How a Foundation Is Helping Journalism Students Build Reporting Skills in a Rapidly Changing Field
/
photo courtesy of Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Whenever we talk about Meta and Google’s impact on the journalism and media landscape, it’s usually through a financial lens — how the tech giants’ digital advertising duopoly has starved outlets of a critical revenue source, or the extent to which their algorithms prioritize clickable content, even if it’s false or misleading.
But these practices have a trickle-down effect that impacts the entire industry, creating an array of new problems that media funders are now prioritizing. Consider the field of journalism education.
Not too long ago, universities tailored curricula toward a world where graduates would receive a degree, pay their dues at a local rag, and (ideally) land a stable job at an outlet with actual paying subscribers and advertisers.
Those days are largely gone. Meta and Google’s dominance has contributed to the shuttering of countless outlets, so there are simply fewer journalism jobs than there used to be. Existing jobs rarely fit the Woodward-and-Bernstein mold of investigative journalism, which is more costly than most outlets can afford. And up-and-coming journalists have to contend with a dizzying new information ecosystem, requiring a whole new set of skills.
The Cincinnati-based Scripps Howard Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the media conglomerate the E.W. Scripps Company, is acutely aware of these challenges. In 2018, it allocated $3 million to establish the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland and Arizona State University to help students adapt to the digital age.
Four years later, “the results — both in terms of the work produced and the journalists who have come out of the program — have been incredible,” said Mike Canan, the foundation’s director of journalism strategies. And so in late March, the foundation announced it would extend its support for the centers for another three years, with $1 million per year, bringing its total support for the centers to $6 million.
“Every journalist could benefit from investigative skills,” Canan told me. “At the same time, there are so many more ways to use technology in place of or paired with old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. The Howard Centers aim to give early-career journalists — sometimes career switchers — those skills.”
About the foundation
The E.W. Scripps Company is a Cincinnati-based broadcasting company founded in 1878 as a chain of daily newspapers by Edward William Scripps and his sister, Ellen Browning Scripps. (For those wondering, the company has never owned the very fictional WKRP in Cincinnati.)
The company launched the Scripps Howard Foundation in 1962 to “advance the cause of a free press through support of excellence in journalism, quality journalism education and professional development.” Childhood literacy is also a big priority area.
In a vast journalism grantmaking ecosystem, the foundation focuses exclusively on creating or funding programs “that bridge the classroom and the newsroom,” Canan said. “We want to support innovative journalism education that creates best practices and meets the needs of the industry and individuals as journalism evolves.”
This support consists of grants, the Scripps Howard Awards for journalists, university partnerships, the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism, and fellowships and internships. A week after announcing its $3 million commitment for the Howard Centers, the foundation selected four journalists to participate in a year-long investigative reporting fellowship administered in partnership with the Scripps Washington Bureau, Newsy and the Texas Tribune.
About the Howard Centers
The foundation established the Howard Centers at UMD and ASU in 2018 to honor the legacy of Roy W. Howard, the former chairman of the Scripps-Howard chain and a pioneering news reporter.
Commenting on the announcement, foundation President and CEO Liz Carter acknowledged that the sector was changing in perilous yet encouraging ways. “In today’s world, there is a lot more information, there is a lot more data for the public to sift through, and there is a lot more opportunity for misinformation,” she said. “But there are also more resources for journalists to use and investigate. Journalists today take a leadership role much earlier in their careers.”
Journalists are frequently thrust into leadership roles, but that doesn’t mean that they’re fully prepared, since newsrooms often lack the funds to properly train them. As a result, student reporters are expected to leave college “fully prepared to do this on their own,” Lucy Dalglish, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at UMD, told the Arizona Republic in 2018. “Today’s newsrooms need help,” Dalglish said. “They need this kind of assistance, and this will also provide them with the next generation of investigative reporters.”
Equipped with the foundation’s support, the Howard Centers rolled out curricula with investigative reporting as the North Star. Students produced “COVID’s Invisible Victims,” which explored the pandemic’s impact on homeless people, and investigations that were cited by a congressional committee on climate change and by HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” Graduates have gone on to land jobs at the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio.
“It’s not just traditional media anymore”
Again, it’s worth remembering that the field looks very different than it did 20 years ago, or even four years ago, when the foundation launched the Howard Centers.
The pandemic forced over 100 local outlets to permanently close and led to record-high newsroom layoffs. On the digital advertising front, Google and Facebook accounted for 55.2% of all spending in 2019. While that figure is expected to drop to 51.9% in 2022, it will be of little comfort to leaders at beleaguered outlets still attempting to recover from the pandemic.
“Traditional media — particularly in print — are in decline as audiences move online and revenue streams follow them to platform giants like Google and Facebook,” wrote University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) Professor Franz Krüger in a February piece in The Conversation. Add it all up, and “the demand for journalism graduates is shrinking, while non-professionals play an increasing role in supplying society with information.” Journalism schools “need to reorient their courses to new kinds of students and adjust the curriculum for the new post-professional world of journalism,” Krüger wrote.
Canan and his team have obviously been thinking about these same issues for a while. “In the short term, the list of future employers is evolving,” he told me. “It’s not just traditional media anymore. Young journalists have to think differently about their job search but also about the skills they will need.”
For example, Canan noted that students now have “a smorgasbord of distribution platforms available. They need to be able to understand not only those options, but also what tool is the right one for each story, and have the skills to best deliver impactful journalism.” In the long term, students will “need to have a very clear framework based in both skills and ethics, as well as the spirit of innovation.”
Here, Canan succinctly lays out how the role of the journalist is evolving in the digital age. Unlike their predecessors, the next generation of journalism students must nimbly navigate the gig economy, tweaking their approach as they jump from platform to platform. The foundation’s infusion of support for the Howard Centers aims to facilitate this transition.
“The industry is changing rapidly, and we foresee that rate of change continuing or accelerating in the foreseeable future,” Canan said. “The Howard Centers are not only delivering groundbreaking investigative journalism that has real-world impacts, but they’re also providing young journalists with a chance to build an impressive toolbox of investigative skills.”
