A bit of an interblog argument has broken out over Alan Mutter’s astonishment at being interviewed by a young journalist who had never heard of Mike Royko.
Mindy McAdams, in Do you know who this is?, has her own list in response, and asks:
But do I expect a 20-year-old (or a 25-year-old) today to know Royko’s work? To know his name? No. Why should she?
Much as I admire Mindy, I think she’s off base. The folks on her list — Vannaver Bush, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, etc. — are all interesting and important people (although I have to admit that pioneering writings by Bush and Nelson bored me to tears, as fascinating as their ideas were.)
The equivalent of her list, in pre-internet days, would be like asking a room full of people if they knew the names of the people who conceived and designed new presses. The connections of Bush, Nelson, Berners-Lee et al to journalism is incidental at best: they’re pioneering work set the stage for the new age. Their contribution to our understanding of how we can do journalism — unlike Royko’s — is non-existent. There’s no connection between Alan’s list and Mindy’s.
Sorry, Mindy. I share Alan’s feelings here. Based on my observations of my students, they have a spotty knowledge of some of the people who have shaped their trade. Most know who Hunter S. Thompson is, but Jimmy Breslin’s shoe-leather work, the deep ties of a Royko or Caen to a community (and their ability to keep people reading) — skills increasingly important to journalists and journalism — are unknown to them.
Journalists today need to know the work of folks such as Will Yurman, Dai Sugano, Seth Gitner, Adrain Holovaty and others who are pushing journalism into new shapes and new places. (And, for that matter, folks like Mindy, Paul Bradshaw, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and others who are driving and chronicling a truly new age of journalism.)
But this new age not cut from new cloth. Photojournalism (whether in slideshows or video) builds on the legacies of Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, Mary Ellen Mark, Bruce Davidson and dozens of others. You can draw up similar lists for writing, for reporting, for pioneering work with documents (I.F. Stone, anybody?), graphics…every aspect of our craft.
I don’t want to replace any the important skills we have to teach with journalism history classes. But I can’t teach students about the possibilities for their storytelling without reference to those whose skills have sharpened, changed and informed the art, any more than I can teach them multimedia journalism without building on the work that Mindy and others have done. It’s a case of Bernard of Chartres’ standing on the shoulders of giants and deserves to be treated as such.
TAGS: EDUCATION, HISTORY, JOURNALISM
Fair enough, Mark. But I would rather that students knew Jimmy Breslin’s story about John F. Kennedy’s gravedigger than know Breslin’s name and his bio.
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On that we are in full agreement. What counts isn’t knowing the names, it’s knowing the work these people produced and the ways their methods, skills and talents can make us all better storytellers.
Mark
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Also posted on Mindy McAdams’ blog
There you go again, Mindy, making a specious comparison. The equivalent of your question about thousands of columnists is akin to asking how many TV shows do you know out of the tens of thousands that have aired since TV was born in 1950.
What matters for young journalists is not how many writers they know, but that they have an understanding of their profession’s evolution — and, more practically, how its best practitioners plied their craft.
On Mark Hamilton’s blog, you make the weak and somewhat troubling point that you care less about whether students know Breslin’s name than that they know his story about JFK’s gravedigger. Do you really want your students to only know the story? Or do you want them to understand how Breslin got the story — i.e., what compelled him to track down the gravedigger, how he extracted details from Pollard, how he wove those details into such an evocative piece?
If you’re any kind of journalism teacher, then you want students to learn the story behind the story — at which point they’ll know more than just the story or Breslin’s name. They’ll have a better idea of what it takes to be a journalist. If you’re not attempting to teach your students at least that much, then it’s hard to figure what they’re gaining from your alleged expertise.
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