Should Journalism Schools Have Known This Was Coming?

In 1999, 12 years after I graduated from high school and seven years after I was hired by the Tampa Tribune, I received my degree in mass communications from the University of South Florida. When I stopped being a full-time student in 1993, I needed only a few credits to graduate. But I had a job; I figured the degree would only be a redundancy I could not afford (financially). I was a poor student, in more ways than one.

I know now how important it was to actually finish school. It wasn't so much about what I was learning in the classes as it was about making a plan for my education and seeing it to fruition. I learned most of what I know about journalism from hands-on experience, but I learned most of what I know about myself during my haphazard college career.

And somewhere in the recesses of my time-addled brain, I seem to recall the softest of warnings being sounded in the course of my college career. This was the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the Internet had become so prevalent and before many folks outside of Microsoft's offices in Redmond, Wash., had any inkling of the meanings of acronyms like HTML, SEO or SERP. Words like "blog" and "iTunes" and "podcast" had not been invented. Yet, some professors spoke of the changing nature of journalism. They spoke of it as an eventuality, something relatively far in the future to ponder while mastering the soon-to-be-antiquated skills being taught in J-school. I mean, think about this: In 1991, I took a required class in photography, wherein we learned the art of film development. When's the last time you developed film? Or even used film?

The point is this: While there was a vague uneasiness at the academic level regarding the future of journalism, nothing was done about it in the early 1990s -- when it would have mattered to so many thousands of future journalists.

Should someone have known? Should some bold, visionary dean of a J-school somewhere in the land have shaken the system and forged a new way of learning? For all I know, that might have been happening at top-flight places like Missouri and North Carolina. But at the two J-schools I attended, Florida and South Florida, there was very little in the way of useful, practical vision. There was solid, fundamentally grounded education, but it was based on a model that, before its students would reach their 40s, would become as irrelevant as vinyl records.

Now, would some new way of learning about the practice of journalism have changed the disastrous business model that was the real reason newspapers died in 2008? I doubt that; publishers and owners made too much money on newspapers for too many years to let the old way of doing business give way gracefully to some new, perhaps less-profitable paradigm. So, the profession died, and our society must live with the consequences of a government under the so-so scrutiny of a terribly weakened watch dog.

Would knowing in 1991 what I know now about the way readers/viewers/listeners/Web surfers receive their news have made me a better writer? No. But it might have allowed me and the thousands of other out-of-work writers to better position ourselves in our chosen fields. Was it the University of Florida and the University of South Florida's responsibility to prepare me for a future in journalism? You bet it was, at least in part. The responsibility also rested with me, and with all journalism students whose careers stretched out so promisingly before them in the early '90s.

That was an empty promise. I confess, I had no idea it would happen in my lifetime. If I had, I would have followed my fellow high school nitwits to law school. Instead, I'll continue to scramble to find a way to make the skills I learned and honed for 22 years relevant. Perhaps it's not too late, but it sure would have been nice to have received a meaningful warning all those years ago.