News flash: Knowledge may be helpful for journalists

WHEN I was 16, already committed to a career in journalism, I was briefly befriended by an elderly newspaperman who repeatedly gave me the same advice:

“Don’t major in journalism when you go to college. All they’ll teach you is to indent for a paragraph and start typing your story halfway down the first page. You’re probably smart enough to learn that in your first six months on the job. You should major in political science or history or economics or English, so you’ll learn something useful to a journalist.”

Figuring that the best way to learn to write well would be to read a lot of good writing and write a lot myself, I majored in English.

Now, however, the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York -- the nation’s most prestigious journalism school -- is embarking on a program that will attempt to rectify exactly what my friend thought was wrong with a traditional journalism education.

He vastly understated what that education has long provided, of course. Skills-based courses in the fundamentals of reporting, writing and editing; classes in libel and ethics, and specialized instruction in international reporting and environmental reporting, among many other subjects, have historically been integral to the curriculum at Columbia and other good journalism schools.

But beginning this fall, Columbia is augmenting its traditional, 70-year-old, one-year master of science program with a one-year master of arts program that will provide what it calls “intensive, subject-area training in a number of broad academic disciplines.”

The program will provide instruction in four areas of journalistic coverage -- politics, arts and culture, business and economics, and science and medicine. Columbia says each will be supervised by individuals who are producing “distinguished journalistic or scholarly work while carrying out their teaching duties.”

(In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably mention that my brother-in-law, Alexander Stille, a Columbia journalism professor and longtime professional journalist, will be in charge of the political journalism section of the program.)

Professors from various Columbia departments will teach many of the courses in what the school calls “an innovative ... network of teaching partnerships” across academic disciplines.

In addition, students will take at least one course each semester outside the journalism department. Thus, a student focusing on business and economics journalism might take courses in corporate finance and the geopolitics of energy. A student interested in political journalism might study the anthropological perspective on political violence or the sociology of the black community. Students pursuing science and medicine journalism could take instruction in drugs and disease and population genetics. Arts and culture study might include classes in the principles of connoisseurship and introduction to the study and theory of film.

Students will also take a class called “Evidence and Inference” that will attempt to teach them how to intelligently evaluate material ranging from purportedly scientific research studies to outright propaganda.

Most big-city newsrooms have already become increasingly sophisticated places in recent years, with ever-growing numbers of reporters covering specialized beats -- science, medicine, law, the environment and religion among them. Some reporters take advanced studies in these areas. A few medical reporters actually have medical degrees; some reporters covering legal affairs have law degrees.

Still, scientists, lawyers, artists, business executives -- virtually everyone the news media cover -- complain frequently that we “just don’t understand” what they do and that we ignorantly, if inadvertently, oversimplify, vilify and sensationalize. That criticism is often valid, and that’s what makes the new Columbia program newsworthy to the general public, rather than just a bit of “inside baseball,” of interest only to journalists.

The Columbia program will be open to graduate-level students, as an optional second year, after the more traditional master of science program. But applicants need not have taken that program to be eligible. It will also be available to journalists already embarked on their journalistic careers and eager to learn more about the issues they are covering or hope to cover.

The new program grew out of a review of journalism education by a task force of distinguished journalists and academics led by Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia, who was faced with replacing the dean of the journalism school and decided the college should first determine the kind of journalism school it wanted at a time when the growing complexity of contemporary life seemed to call for journalists with greater sophistication and specialized knowledge.

“One of the most significant needs for journalists today is to have a high level of knowledge about the subject they are reporting and communicating,” Bollinger said in the task force’s April 2003 statement. “Of all the criticisms of the press, one of the most serious -- and, happily, the most remediable -- is the lack of context for stories.

“At its best,” Bollinger said, “journalism mediates between the world of expertise and general knowledge. To do that well ... is remarkably difficult. A necessary element is substantive knowledge, the kind of knowledge you cannot just pick up in the course of doing a story.”

NICHOLAS Lemann, who was a member of Bollinger’s task force and was ultimately appointed dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, says the “organizing principle of the new program is to provide subject matter expertise. We want to teach things that are useful -- essential -- to good reporting, material that will enable reporters to bring a real subject-matter understanding to stories on difficult subjects, knowledge that they probably wouldn’t get in the workplace.”

A distinguished journalist, Lemann has worked for the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Washington Monthly, Texas Monthly and the Washington Post and has written several books. When I visited him last week in his Columbia office, he said he was drawing on his own experience (“and ignorance”) in helping to develop the curriculum for the new program. “I have a long mental list of things I wish I knew, holes in my education, things that would have made me a better journalist,” he said.

In announcing the new program, Columbia officials have harkened back to the manifesto issued by Joseph Pulitzer, the founder of the journalism school, who said, “... in general university courses, we may find byproducts that would meet the needs of the journalist. Why not divert, deflect, extract and concentrate them for the journalist as specialist.”

Lemann says he’s already received more than 100 applications for the school year that begins this fall.

“We want to choose 25 to start with and grow to 60 students a year,” he says. “In order to encourage participation, we’re offering it tuition-free for the first year and maybe for the first two or three years, depending on funding.” After that, tuition will be $31,593.

Like Lemann, I often reflect on how much I don’t know, on how much better I could have done my job the last 40 years if I’d had the opportunity to study intensively what a journalist needs to understand in such fields as economics, sociology, politics, history, anthropology, the arts and religion, among other subjects.

Columbia’s new program is probably coming too late for me, but it’s a great idea for the next generation of journalists.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.