When I recently suggested to the other journalism professors at Purchase College that we ought to throw out our students’ newspaper subscription program and get them to read the news online, there were no real takers.
I said I was fed up with the headaches of arranging subscriptions, helping with distribution and dealing with stolen papers. And I was finding it harder to come up with good answers to students who were increasingly asking why they had to pay $28 a semester for The New York Times when they could get it online for free.
My colleagues were not deaf to my arguments, but they felt all the headaches were worth putting up with for the superior experience their students would have leafing through the pages together in class rather than reading it on the Times‘ Web site.
Kevin Cappallo, national sales director for The New York Times, calls this the “serendipitous” experience of newspaper reading, in which the reader happens upon stories of interest. He told me that “having the tangible product in hand is certainly the way to go.”
He has spent decades working to get the Times in the hands of students but now acknowledges that his biggest competition comes from nytimes.com, which is leading the pack in online news innovation.
This debate between print and the Internet is really the latest manifestation of a larger struggle in all journalism departments: how to get students to stay abreast of current events.
I’ll admit, there is something wonderful about poring over the paper with your class. The process connects you to that paper and to the broader world of current affairs. There’s something satisfying about hearing the rustle of the pages as we turn to a story together. I hope the process will inspire my students to adopt a lifetime pleasure of mine: sitting down to read the morning paper.
But I have come to realize that my habits, and those of my colleagues, were formed before Facebook and Twitter and Google and e-mail became ingrained in everyday life. My students live so much of their lives online. So while I do lament the threat to newspaper reading, I see in the hyperconnected lives of my students an opportunity to get them to form news literacy habits of a different kind.
Other journalism faculty, I found, have been coming to the same conclusion.
At the University of Cincinnati, Elissa Sonnenberg’s upper-level journalism seminar students sign up for Twitter and report on if (and how) it changes the way they get their news. All of her introductory newswriting students create blogs not just for their original stories, but also news analyses by the Project for Excellence in Journalism that compare broadcast, print and online story topics each week.
“We are looking less and less at print and more online in discussions of media literacy,” Sonnenberg said.
John Paul, a journalism lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has added an electronic twist to the time-honored news quiz. He encourages his students to monitor his Delicious account, where he bookmarks interesting news items. They go there, he said, if only to see “where John’s getting his questions from.”
Some of the faculty at the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University, which has a renowned news literacy program, ask students to set their home pages to sites such as the Newseum’s map of each day’s front pages. That way when they log on at the start of the day, the first thing they see is a news source, said Howard Schneider, dean of the school.
Rachel McClelland, a journalism instructor at Indiana State University, requires her students to read the news online daily. They also take turns doing online presentations on current affairs, which are linked through the class Blackboard site. “That’s my most effective assignment,” she says.
The advent of the Internet has been a groundbreaking development for college news literacy, argues Tom Rosenstiel, founder and director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Center.
Historically, he said, news organizations found college students hard to reach, as they were often isolated on campuses and far more focused on reading books than newspapers. Now the Internet has successfully penetrated the ivory tower, he said, effortlessly bringing news to student eyeballs for free. For that reason, he said, pedagogy’s print loyalists are fighting a losing battle.
“The people who are advocating the touching of a print product are on the wrong side of history,” said Rosenstiel. “It’s perverse. It’s like arguing that all papers are written in cursive. We are moving to an on-demand news consumption habit. If you go to The New York Times Web site, you get everything that’s in the newspaper and more. … You can produce a superior product on the Internet.”
In December, the Pew Research Center published a survey that showed a shift in the news consumption habits of young people. It found that 59 percent of Americans younger than 30 say they get most of their national and international news online — equal to the percentage that identified television as their primary source.
This week, Stony Brook University on Long Island, N.Y., is hosting a conference on news literacy with some prominent journalism figures in attendance, including former ABC News anchor Ted Koppel and New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. The goal is to “craft a national strategy on how to teach news literacy” to college and high school students across the country.
I’ve decided that next semester I will tell my classes how to subscribe to the Times, but I won’t require it. I created a blog, Journoprof, with a blogroll of links to media organizations and news sources I think my students should know about and check out. And I’ll spend the summer changing the syllabus for my introduction to journalism class, incorporating online tools that will encourage my students to engage with the news.
As the University of Cincinnati’s Sonnenberg said, the Internet “is the elephant in the room — or the glowing screen in the room — that we can’t afford to ignore, or let our students ignore.”
