“Journalism” Items

Opening slide from the 2002 Journalism & Technology, Linked Forever presentation greeting a Danish audience with "God Eftermiddag"

Journalism & Technology, Linked Forever Presentation

This is a presentation I gave to the Centre for Journalism and Further Education on Sept. 23, 2002. The opening slide greets the audience with “God Eftermiddag,” so I was clearly speaking to a Danish room. At the time I was Managing Director of Finberg-Gentry, the Digital Futurist Consultancy, a Presidential Scholar at The Poynter Institute and a Senior Fellow at the American Press Institute’s Media Center.

The purpose, as I laid it out early on, was to help the audience think about the future: how journalism is shaped by technology, how consumers drive technology, and how journalists need to position themselves regarding technology. My argument was that journalists could no longer treat technology as somebody else’s department.

For decades, journalists had little reason to pay attention to technology… The pace of change was slow. 50 years between innovations. Hot type to cold type. Letterpress to offset. Today, the pace is much faster. 20 years or shorter…

I split the disruption into two buckets. Internal: how we do business. External: what is our business. And I was blunt that the external questions mattered more, because our industry was at what I called an “inflection point.” I leaned on the Marshall McLuhan line that has never stopped being useful:

“We see the world through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

Much of the middle of the talk was a tour of devices and delivery: broadband going mainstream in the U.S. and accelerating in Western Europe, information devices wired and wireless, the smart phone as “a telephone with an operating system,” the first generation of reading devices — Softbook, E-Reader, RocketBook — plus NewsStand and Zinio, the coming TabletPC from “those fun folks up in Redmond, Wash.,” home gateways, personal video recorders, IBM’s MetaPad, the OQO, E-Ink displays and IBM’s e-newspaper mockup. I also included my caveat that not all technological changes are valuable, and that convergence might be an example of value that isn’t clearly understood.

Woven through the slides were five questions for the audience, and the third one is the one I’d still ask today:

While the paper might not disappear from newspaper, what happens if those who read it on paper disappear?

The last third of the presentation was the part I cared most about: a method for deciding what to do. The Technology Prioritization Matrix, copyrighted by The Digital Futurist Consultancy, simplified the decision to two criteria — consumer value, and expense and effort — with a list of internal questions (productivity, training, skills alignment, probability of success) and external ones (revenue potential, market share, customer adoption). The point was that not every project with a “gee whiz” factor returns value to the consumer or the company, and that there would be no single leap to the new world. I closed with four technology rules, including one I’ve repeated many times since:

Experiments cost money; doing nothing costs even more

Reading this in 2026, the specific hardware is a museum tour — most of those reading devices are gone, and the ones that survived didn’t look much like the mockups. But the framing held up better than the gadgets: consumers drove the fundamental changes, adoption took longer than predicted, and the newsrooms that waited for certainty paid the higher price.

Cover pages of the Associated Press Managing Editors 1995 committee report on journalism education

APME’s 1995 Report on Journalism Education

The 1995 Journalism Education Committee of the Associated Press Managing Editors set itself a straightforward assignment: go back to the committee’s own 1984 study of journalism schools and see how it had held up. Ham Smith of Washington and Lee University, who wrote the lead section, answered in five words — “Mostly, it seems, not much has changed.” The committee was chaired by Deanna Sands of the Omaha World-Herald, with vice chairmen George Kennedy of the University of Missouri, Marcia Bullard of USA Weekend and Mary Dedinsky of Northwestern.

The report opens with a line that still describes the terrain pretty well:

Journalism education has been called everything from an oxymoron to the last best hope for professional ethics. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere between the extremes. One sure thing, though. Thereu2019s no better way to stir up a passionate discussion than to ask educators and professional journalists whatu2019s ahead.

Smith lays out the structural mismatch between newsrooms and J-schools: about 80 percent of entry-level daily newspaper jobs went to journalism majors, while fewer than 20 percent of journalism students were in the news-editorial sequence. Small papers wanted graduates who could work the first day; big papers wanted an education and hired five years later from the small papers. Paul LaRocque reports on a survey the committee mailed to 202 journalism schools, accredited and non-accredited, which drew 128 responses u2014 a 63 percent return u2014 measuring schools against the 1984 recommendations.

The sharpest material is about accreditation. Bob Giles, then editor and publisher of The Detroit News and president of the accrediting council, had told a February gathering of deans at the University of Maryland something the American Journalism Review called an extraordinary statement:

u201cJournalism education still seems to fall uncomfortably between universities and the industry. Neither has embraced journalism education. Too many universities seem more comfortable with the idea of mass communications as a research-based discipline, while the industry wants graduates who can do journalism, but is not willing to make a full commitment of support.u201d

u201cAs the number of accredited programs has increased … it is clear that we can no longer give that assurance.u201d

George Kennedy’s chapter tracks the fight over Giles’ proposal to recognize merit beyond the minimum standards u2014 first framed as a u201ctwo-tier system,u201d a phrase quickly abandoned. Florida A&M Dean Robert Ruggles: u201cYouu2019re either accredited or youu2019re not. Degrees of accreditation make no sense.u201d Jerry Ceppos of the San Jose Mercury News, APME’s representative on the council, was on the other side: u201cAny time you can get journalism education to raise standards, thatu2019s a good thing.u201d Maryland’s Reese Cleghorn had advice for editors who wanted to help u2014 get to know the programs, support the good ones, u201cAnd increase starting salaries.u201d

Berl Schwartz of Michigan State interviews Giles at length. Carol Nunnelley of The Birmingham News profiles the University of Alabama’s Institute for Communication Research, whose biggest customer was Southern Progress Corp. And Dick Thien of Nebraska closes the report with u201cA Dangling Conversation,u201d a bus ride in which an editor and an educator answer for each other’s sins without knowing they are seated side by side. It ends with both of them giving the same answer to the same question:

u201cI love it u2014 and if I do it right I can make a difference.u201d

Two passages date the document usefully. Lawrence McConnell of the Tampa Tribune, whose paper u201cled Media Generalu2019s leap into cyberspace with Tampa Bay Online on Prodigy,u201d says flatly: u201cIf there is such a thing as journalism school graduates prepared for this field today, I have yet to meet them.u201d And John Driscoll, retired from The Boston Globe, notes that ASNE offered a videotape on the future of journalism at cost, $10, hoping it would spark curriculum discussions. u201cAlas, only 70 were sold.u201d

I keep this one because the argument in it never ended. A decade later I was at Poynter building News University, and much of that work was aimed squarely at the gap this committee was describing u2014 professionals who wanted training and educators who wanted respect, with not much traffic between them. Reading it in 2026, with journalism programs still being merged, renamed or closed, and with AI now doing to the newsroom what the Internet was doing in 1995, the committee’s central finding holds up better than anyone should want it to.

A Telegram From Washington: Named a 1971 Sears Congressional Journalism Intern

In 1970, big news arrived on paper, delivered to your door. Not email, not a phone call, not a text message — a Western Union telegram, all capital letters, punctuation spelled out or dropped, and the sender paying by the word. This one came to my parents’ house on Ortega Street in San Francisco while I was a journalism student at San Francisco State.

THE AWARDS COMMITTEE HAS NAMED YOU A 1971 SEARS CONGRESSIONAL JOURNALISM INTERN AND IS ARRANGING FOR YOUR APPOINTMENT TO A CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE STAFF, FULL DETAILS WILL FOLLOW BY LETTER IN MID-JUNE, PLEASE SEND IMMEDIATELY YOUR SUMMER ADDRESS AND TELEPHONE NUMBER ROTH AT RESIDENCE AND PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT. CONGRATULATIONSS

The telegram is dated May 20, 1970, and it is signed by:

JOHN L WHEELER, VICE PRESIDENT, GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, SEARS, ROEBUCK AND CO, 1211 CONNECTICUT AVENLE WASHINGTON, D.C. 20056

Note the address: the telegram was sent by a corporate executive in Washington, D.C. The awards committee named the interns; the details — where you would actually be working, and for whom — would follow by letter in mid-June. In other words, you were told you had won before anyone could tell you what you had won.

The image itself is a reminder of how these documents were made. The routing codes across the top, the operator’s marks, the transmission time stamps, the form number at the bottom — all of it printed around a message that a machine typed out at the receiving end. The optical character reader stumbles over parts of it, which is fair; so does the eye. “BOTH” became “ROTH.” “AVENUE” became “AVENLE.”

Looking at it now, more than fifty years on, what strikes me is that a piece of news that changed the direction of a young journalist’s year came as a fragile sheet of paper with a glued-on tape of type. Today the same message would be an email, or a notification on a phone, gone from view in a week and unfindable in a year. The telegram survived because it was an object, and because I thought it was worth keeping. That is a decent argument for archives, and part of why these documents are here.