What The Reader Elite Means for Journalism Schools

In the wake of my last post about The Reader Elite, I had several discussions with friends in the media industry about what such an audience would mean for journalism as an academic concentration. The Reader Elite is what I call the group of people that will emerge as paywalls begin to ramp up in earnest. The Reader Elite is affluent, well educated, and small in size, and perhaps the only group that will be willing to pay money for professional content creators.

Since that audience will be small — and thus the amount of people whose sole job it is to serve them will be smaller, too — is there any purpose for having journalism schools anymore?

In the coming years, I think most journalism schools will shrink or disappear. The ones remaining will be drastically different, with students focusing on topics that don’t relate to content creation at all. Moreover, some of the best new professional content creators won’t attend journalism schools. They will hail from different majors and degrees, like business, computer science and finance. The notion of being a professional journalist who is merely an objective observer of a topic or industry will officially fade in the coming years. This is a good thing, since it was a stupid fantasy that it should be like that anyway.

Even with the Web 2.0 decade now closed, journalism schools still teach decades-old methods that make no sense for the current media landscape. Many think that adding a “Web journalism” or a few HTML hacking classes can bring them into the 21st century, but it doesn’t. Journalism school teaches kids to be reporters, and little else. They learn to call people and collect information to construct a story, and they boil it down into a “he said, she said” story.

Whether it’s captured in text, sound or video, the “he said, she said” story professes to put a journalist on the sidelines as an objective observer. It presumes that regardless of their own opinions, if you can get quotes and information from two opposing sides and package them into a story, you have been a good journalist. If you’re really good, you might even be able to appear on television as an “expert.” Students in J-Schools are thus taught to worship what my friend Stowe Boyd would call the Church of Journalism.

The problem is, most journalists today aren’t experts; they merely report about people that are. This creates a barrier and credibility problem that people paid little attention to before the Web because the journalists’ identities to regular people were less transparent, and less social. Even those journalists on TV whose face you did see  — you couldn’t click on a link to see their background, disclosures, or why they might be qualified to be reporting on a certain topic.

Now you can go on the Web and find out. The less you can find on them, the more skeptical you are of their analysis.

On the Web, where social connections reign supreme, trust and truth matter more than objectivity. For this reason, journalism schools in the way they are currently comprised don’t work. For my money, one of the better business journalists to emerge in the coming years probably went to business school and interned at a multinational firm instead of a newspaper. In the Church of Journalism, this was deemed an ugly “conflict of interest”; For new content creation on the social Web, this is viewed as great experience and credibility provided it’s disclosed. This will have great benefits. If more of the financial journalists worked in finance first, maybe they could have blown the whistle on certain practices before it was too late and we were plunged into a near-catastrophic recession.

But this argument about expertise and credibility glosses over an important question: Is teaching people how to create quality content important? I think it is, but that’s something that should occur in elementary school education and in high school, utilizing the variety of tools the Web offers and making sure kids know how to write and express themselves in a clear way. At a certain point, as it concerns doing content creation for a profession, it’s also innate: You have it or you don’t.

Perhaps a content creation class should be offered in college, but I think it should pale in comparison to the amount of classes that focus on the topic a content creator covers.

Journalism schools were made to serve the Church of Journalism and the vanity contained within it (“Oh, I’m a journalist actually.”). The foundations of that cathedral have been shaken to the core because there is less money to validate its existence and shield the inadequacies of some of the people in it. My advice to kids currently in journalism school is to, at the very least, find a niche and expertise that isn’t about content creation itself. If you do, you might be one of the lucky ones to serve the Reader Elite.