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Imagining the Journalist of the Future:Technological Visions of JournalismEducation and NewsworkBrian Creecha & Andrew L. Mendelsonb

a Department of Journalism, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA,USAb Graduate School of Journalism, City University of New York, NewYork, NY, USAPublished online: 15 May 2015.

To cite this article: Brian Creech & Andrew L. Mendelson (2015) Imagining the Journalist of theFuture: Technological Visions of Journalism Education and Newswork, The Communication Review,18:2, 142-165, DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2015.1031998

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The Communication Review, 18:142–165, 2015Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1071-4421 print/1547-7487 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10714421.2015.1031998

Imagining the Journalist of the Future:Technological Visions of Journalism Education

and Newswork

BRIAN CREECHDepartment of Journalism, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

ANDREW L. MENDELSONGraduate School of Journalism, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

Digitization has resulted in great uncertainty for journalism,leading to disruption of business models, revenue streams, mediadistinctions, and production practices. This uncertainty has led tomany articles, reports, blog posts, and general commentary dis-cussing the future of both journalism and the skills required byjournalists to succeed in this environment. This essay analyzesthese discourses, focusing specifically on the nature of technologyas the sole determiner of journalism’s future, with interventionsaimed at journalism education and the structure of newswork.An idealized notion of the technologically adept journalist, ready tousher in digital stability, emerges as the object of these debates and,thanks in large part to the limited scope and ahistorical characterof digital discourse, obscures more persistent, systemic critiques oftechnology and journalism.

Thanks to digital technologies and the growth of the Internet, news indus-tries have seen a disruption of business models, revenue streams, mediadistinctions, and production practices over the past decade. Digitization hasushered in an era where notions of journalist, source, and audience areblurred. New technologies have also allowed for new forms of storytellingto emerge, such as enriched multimedia content and data visualization, aswell as new forms of audience engagement and measurement, each a devel-opment that challenges expectations of what journalists need to know how

Address correspondence to Brian Creech, Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism,Temple University, Annenberg Hall, Room 330C, 2020 North 13th Street, Philadelphia, PA19122, USA. E-mail: brian.creech@temple.edu

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Imagining the Journalist of the Future 143

to do (Huesca, 2000). At the center of these changes often rests an ideal-ized notion of the technologically adept journalist who creates compellingcontent by mastering digitally based techniques of reporting, producing, anddistributing the news, thus offering a blueprint for managing journalism’scurrent crisis. Take as an example the words of former Boston Globe digitaldesign director and executive director of Northwestern University’s KnightNews Lab Miranda Mulligan (2012): “Learning how to make software for sto-rytelling and how to realize news presentations into code are currently thehottest, most pressing skillsets journalists can study” (para. 1). Using termssuch as “Zuckerbergian” to describe an ideal, future version of herself, recentColumbia Journalism school graduate and Atlantic contributor Olga Khazan(2013) writes of her own technological aspirations as a journalism student:

I would learn to code, that thing everyone was always telling journaliststo do, and thus ensure that I would be essential to any newsroom inAmerica. I would sail in ahead of the hundreds of other applicants, Ithought. The hiring editor would rush to the HR office clutching mybuzzword-laden resume (para. 3).

Khazan ultimately critiques her own ideal by pointing out that softwaredevelopment is its own complex discipline and noting that many news-rooms still operate with strict divisions of labor. Still, many commentatorsforward notions of technologically proficient journalists as both saviors ofnewsroom budgets and models for current students, and it is these notionsthat this essay seeks to critique and interrogate by looking at contemporarycelebrations of technology in journalism.

In order to critique contemporary celebrations and arguments abouttechnology, this essay analyzes the professional discourses surrounding tech-nologies in the newsroom, focusing specifically on arguments about thefuture of journalism education and the structure of news organizations.In recent years, journalism think tanks and thought leaders have conflatedstructural changes in the news industry with extant pressures felt by exec-utives and journalists, leading to statements such as the following, recentlypublished in Nieman Reports: “Journalism education has come to the sameominous inflection point that journalism itself has reached – and the stakesare just as high” (Marcus, 2014, p. 5). As we will argue, an idealized notionof the technologically adept journalist bridges concerns about the future ofnewswork and journalism education because, as a normative concept, itarticulates what journalists should do and what they need to know to doit. This ideal also offers a means for critiquing the educational structuresand professional routines that, in many proponents’ views, prevent robusttechnological change from taking root in the profession.

These discourses, advanced by thought leaders both within and outsidethe industry, obscure important critiques of journalism’s systemic failings.

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The celebration of technology’s importance to journalism is not new, but, asthis paper will argue, it has real consequences for the way individual newsproducers are conceived of, educated, and integrated into news organiza-tions. As Salcetti (1995) argues, high praise for technology and mechanizationin journalism at the end of the 19th century led to significant changes in howreporters produced and distributed the news: “Newsworkers’ labors wereincreasingly bordered, and in turn valued, by their technological place in theproduction process of gathering, writing, and producing news” (p. 49). Thissituation is not very different from the one observed in newsrooms todayand its persistence reveals a great deal about the meanings we associatewith journalists and news production.

CONSTRUCTING THE IDEALIZED JOURNALIST

In order to contextualize contemporary debates about technology and thenews, this essay turns to studies and scholarly analyses of education andnewswork in order to show how concerns about technology’s role in jour-nalism often obscure the cultural values, practices, and structures of meaningthat surround individual journalists. Discourses celebrating technology as thecause of and solution to journalism’s problems tend not to address this rel-evant scholarship, yet it is important background for these debates (Louw,2001). Alhough the Hutchins Commission on the Freedom of the Press report(1947) codified the media’s role in democratic society, over the followingdecades scholars continued to identify systemic obstacles that prevent newsorganizations from fulfilling this function. Since the report’s release, manyscholars have identified a variety of biases built into the modern practicesof journalism, often noting how professional cultures cause these systemicproblems to persist (Bennett, 2011; Cappella & Jamieson, 1997; Gans, 1979;Hermann & Chomsky, 1988; Siebert, 1968; Tuchman, 1978). These critiquesare very much concerned with the institutional and economic structures ofprofessional journalism, but it is from within these structures that operativeand idealized notions of the individual journalist emanate (Baker, 2001).

The professional trends and the shortcomings commentators identifyare part and parcel of the institutionalized practices that construct the indi-vidual journalist’s role in the news production process. As Harvey (2007)argues, individuating forces such as educational programs that privilege tech-nical skills over critical engagement and management strategies that fracturelabor’s collective power constitute a broader neoliberal project. Within aneoliberal framework, overt discourses of individual freedom and responsi-bility alongside specific policies that define institutional failure as the resultof an individual’s deficiency further obscure the ways in which public insti-tutions fail to meet their normative ideals at a structural level (Gilbert, 2014).In the case of journalism, it is worth looking at how journalism education and

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newswork—as the set of idealized and practical conditions that journalismeducation should prepare students for—have historically created the termsused to both understand the forces that define the role of the individualjournalist and set the discursive parameters for debates about journalism’stechnological future.

The fraught nature of journalism education

For journalism as a profession to adapt to changing conditions, commen-tators from the academy and the industry alike target their interventionsat journalism education, and these debates about the nature of journal-ism education often reveal competing visions of both journalism and therole of individual reporters. The arrival of new technologies, such as radioand television, spark debates about the changes they may portend for jour-nalism and about what journalism students will need to know in order todeploy these technologies effectively as professionals (Folkerts, Hamilton, &Lemann, 2013; Medsger, 1996; University of Oregon School of Journalism,1987). Writing in 1987, the Project for the Future of Journalism Educationstated, “In the midst of what has been called a communication revolution,journalism schools must give their students utilitarian information about thestate of the art in technology that will affect communications” (Universityof Oregon School of Journalism, p. 7). But debates about technology alsosuggest a more existential insecurity in both journalism and journalismeducation. As Folkerts et al. (2013) argue:

“How should a university endeavor to teach someone how to be ajournalist? How academic should journalism education be, and howmuch like professional practice? How much should it focus on the skillsand modes of presentation associated with journalism, and how muchon understanding the subjects journalists cover? Who should teach injournalism schools?” (p. 1)

It is the perceived deficiency in university structure to adequately addressthese questions that opens up not only room for critique by both enemiesand allies of university journalism programs, but also for the introductionof reforms aimed at defining the skills individual journalists should learn.Journalism education is often denigrated from inside the academy for beingtoo vocational, technical, and skills oriented, and for not spending enoughtime examining issues related to the role of journalism in society (Adam,2001; Carey, 1996; Fedler, Carey, & Counts, 1998; Hyde, 1937; Rakow, 2001;Reese, 1999). Hyde (1937) stresses that journalism programs should helpstudents become “theorists,” teaching what students “cannot—or probablywill not—learn in a newspaper office” (p. 36).

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Critics who argue for teaching and research that places journalism in itslarger contexts—technological, social, and historical—often decry a focus onskills and their associated technologies as being too limited to the immediateconcerns of the journalism industry (de Burgh, 2003; Deuze, 2001; Ghiglione,2001; Katz, 2002; Reese, 1999; University of Oregon School of Journalism,1987). Folkerts et al. (2013) synthesize this history when they argue:

Understanding the contexts in which journalism takes place should bejust as important in professional education as is mastering the prevailingnorms of journalistic practice at the moment a student happens to bein school; what many journalists have long derided as “media studies”and “theory” in fact should be an essential part of a working journalist’seducation. (pp. 4–5)

Many scholars in this vein argue that journalism research and curricula shouldfocus on the needs of citizens and communities, independent of journalism’sinstitutional structures (Carey, 2000; Dates, 2001; Liebler, 2001; Reese andCohen, 2000; University of Oregon School of Journalism, 1987). The reportby the University of Oregon School of Journalism on journalism educationdecries the notion that journalism schools should be the “handmaiden toindustry, not its critic or visionary guide”; it argues that industry demands area pernicious influence on public and professional perceptions of the purposeof journalism education (University of Oregon School of Journalism, 1987,p. 28).

Critics more sympathetic to the industry, however, have argued thatjournalism programs are too conceptual and spend little time on practicaljournalistic skills, especially the “basics” of writing, reporting, and editing.These critics argue that time spent on communication theory is not useful forthe daily lives of journalists and that journalism programs should respond tothe needs of the profession (Boroff, 1965; Corrigan, 1993; Medsger, 1996).For example, Corrigan (1993), in reviewing titles of research papers at a jour-nalism education conference, states: “Until journalism professors use theirintellectual talents and research efforts to address industry needs better andto prepare future practitioners better, they will continue to endure charges of‘ineptitude’ and ‘irrelevance’” (p. 45). Such critiques of journalism educationreveal an industry-oriented rationality that construes journalism students asthe repository of skills while it elides broader concerns both about journal-ism’s place in a democratic society and the kinds of education journalismstudents need in order to fulfill that role.

The split articulated in the preceding paragraphs is more than a categor-ical divide between theory/practice or academia/industry. It is the discursivebackground that circumscribes contemporary debates, where argumentsabout what journalists should know and how they should be taught cre-ate the conceptual conditions for understanding journalism education’s role

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in producing ideal journalists. In this regard, Folkerts et al. (2013) attempt tobridge industry/academia tensions:

It is critical that educators and professionals recognize that digital skills,while necessary, do not constitute professional journalism. . . . [M]any ofthe arguments about journalism education in the digital age are properlyunderstood as the present-day version of the essential conflict betweennewsroom and university perspectives that has characterized our fieldsince the nineteenth century. . . . The new age especially demands ofjournalists the kind of broader understanding that universities are set upto provide. (p. 60)

Embedded in their words is a persistent question about which group—educators or professionals—is more equipped to articulate journalism’sfuture and orient students to the field’s demands and practices. Folkertset al.’s statement—similar to arguments made by others—illustrates the nor-mative role that commentators, educators, and administrators alike believeeducation should play in the construction of idealized journalists and the dis-cursive power this concept holds as they organize their institutions to bestproduce this ideal. An industry-centric vision of journalism’s future emergesfrom the documents analyzed in this essay, bearing evidence of a discursivefield that obscures public-oriented visions of the press. Instead, this discoursepresents a vision of a future for journalism premised on individual journal-ists’ enhanced technological capacities and an industry poised to follow thelead of these rising journalists.

The idealized journalist and the demands of newswork

Although critiques of education offer visions of what a journalist should beand know, the conditions experienced at many news organizations offer amaterial reality that further defines the individual’s role in industry-specificterms. The labor that goes into producing the news is often given formthrough journalism’s technological and institutional arrangements, but asHardt (1995) has argued, much journalism research tends to overlook theworking conditions of journalists themselves. Instead, academics and schol-ars tend to recreate an understanding of the news that fails to show howjournalists “were not protected from the power of media ownership andfaced the social and economic consequences of an increasingly complexworld of labor” (p. 6). In short, as news organizations’ industrial demandsplace downward pressure on individual workers to comport their routines,desires, professional identities, and self-conceptions to the needs of the newsproduction process, visions of journalism’s future often have unarticulatedconsequences for the reality these individuals experience.

By obscuring the conditions under which journalists produce the news,studies of journalism reinforce labor relations where individuals are part of

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a professionalized machine built to extract profit from the news product(Salcetti, 1995). Newsworkers, like other culture workers, are often alien-ated from the conditions of their employment, romanticizing the job despiteprecarity, low pay, and drudgery (Cohen, 2012). Looking at early-20th-century novels featuring journalists as evidence of an idealized vision ofthe profession, Brennen (1995) finds that “because the identity and valueof newsworkers was tied to the production of news, not only their workbut often their own understanding of themselves as individuals tended tobecome separated from their actual existence” (p. 96). Narratives depictinglong hours, low pay, mean bosses, and gritty, yet bureaucratic conditionswere often celebrated by reviewers and critics for their accurate represen-tation of the profession, she finds, thus making the routinized, industrialnews production process appear as a natural arrangement regardless of theconditions felt by real workers.

As the industrial organizing principle of professional journalism, edito-rial hierarchy structures the roles of the people engaged in churning outthe news as a product; “newsworkers’ adherence to [these] organizationalrealities” ensures the regular production of news content (Tuchman, 1978,p. 176). The individual worker’s adoption of these values therefore playsan important part in the commercialization of the news, as technologicallydependent production practices dictate what newswork entails and howindividuals may comport themselves to it (Baldasty, 1992).

The routinized nature of newswork is instrumental to the creation of“news” as a commercial product, and individual journalists’ roles are oftendefined as subservient to the product. As Soloski (1989) argues, the profes-sionalization of the news process attempts to accommodate and normalizeprofessional values in a structure that exists independent of any partic-ular news organization’s culture. Because this professionalization processobscures the conditions under which individuals produce the news with arationale celebrating standardization and efficiency, the labor conditions ofjournalists, as well as their struggles to organize against overtly commer-cial pressures in service of a public interest, remain hidden (McChesney,1999). A common understanding of the individual’s role in the news hier-archy shared across organizations secures the stability of the overall newsproduction process. However, analyses focused on technological aspectsof news production tend to obscure the work individual journalists mustdo to develop competencies and use these technologies (cf. Carey &Maynard, 2005; Entman, 2005; Hamilton, 2004). A fundamental assumptionundergirding this scholarship is that journalists are malleable enough to fitinto ever-changing models of news production; such an assumption thusreveals a workplace structure that is contingent upon each individual’s abil-ity to recognize and readily incorporate shifting conditions into their workroutines.

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Scholars studying the professional pressures that digital technologiesexert on journalists find that consistent articulations of journalism’s norma-tive value reassert the individual’s role in creating the news product, despitethe changes wrought by new technologies (Rosen 1999; Weaver, Deam,Brownlee, Voakes, & Wilhoit, 2007). Both Usher (2011) and Lewis (2012b)argue that models of citizen journalism challenge the role of professionalnewsworkers by reconfiguring the types of media content that news com-panies may profit from, as well as by pushing nontraditional journalists todevelop skills to incorporate user-produced content in ways that are con-sistent with journalistic norms. Normative visions of journalism may persist,but shifts in the news production process toward digital platforms render thematerial conditions of newswork much more precarious. Anderson (2013)finds that in the face of wide-scale, digitally abetted disruptions of newsbusiness models, individual reporters and editors not only lose job security,they also lose the institutional support that makes producing journalism thatadheres to the industry’s normative standards possible.

Pundits and scholars articulating a vision of journalism’s digital futureoperate in a discursive regime that typically ignores labor and the humancosts inherent in producing the news. Therefore, they can advance ide-alized notions of individual journalists possessing the skills necessary toresolve contemporary journalism’s myriad crises (Compton & Bennedetti,2011; McChesney & Nichols, 2010). Rosen (1999) historicizes the relationshipbetween journalists and technologies when arguing, “They have learned toemploy radio, television, and now the Internet as platforms for their work,enlarging its human dimension and adding new roles to an expanding reper-toire” (p. 282). His comments suggest that savvy journalists persist despiteeconomic shifts and technological change, but as Compton and Benedetti(2011) note when looking at specific changes wrought by the Internet,such as an increase in unpaid citizen journalism and user-generated con-tent, “The labour of reporting costs money; it takes time and the knowledgeacquired through sustained effort. Piece-work reporting and participant-observer video captured during moments of crisis cannot replace the formerinstitutional news-net, flawed as it may have been” (pp. 61–62). In thecontext of this essay, discourses that normalize news production practicesoperate by articulating the skills and competencies an individual journalistmust possess in order to fit profitably within a changing profession.

RATIONALE AND METHOD OF INQUIRY

This essay takes as its object of study the discourses and visions of digitaljournalism forwarded by major nonprofits, think tanks, academic institutions,and professional organizations in order to understand how they conceptual-ize idealized journalists and the industry’s future. These organizations often

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position themselves as occupying a space outside both academia and tra-ditional news organizations, thus granting them a vantage point to spy thefuture as it approaches. Looking at the Knight Foundation, Lewis (2012a) hasfound that the organization’s shift in focus from professional praxis towardindustry-wide technological innovation belies an effort “to innovate itself andthe journalism field by renegotiating the rhetorical and actual boundaries ofjournalism work” (p. 329). Emerging practices such as user-generated contentand crowd participation shift the operative notion of what a journalist is anddoes in ways that have real effects on the working lives of journalists (Lewis,2012b). It is our contention that the trends Lewis identifies also emanatefrom other organizations positing themselves as industry-wide thought lead-ers, articulating technologically inspired visions of the future that oftenbend normative notions of journalism to align with industry-wide businesstrends.

Our analysis is driven by these research questions: What relationshipbetween journalism and technology do texts produced by thought leadersarticulate? What idealized notions of individual journalists emerge? How arejournalism education and newswork—defined as the practical and idealizedconditions surrounding the production of news—implicated in the discoursesdiscerned from the collected documents? In the following analysis, the col-lected documents offer a textual body of evidence where, in the Foucaultiansense, the work of these discourses can be traced and uncovered (Douglas,2010; Foucault, 1972). The analysis interprets documents, publications, posi-tion papers, blog posts, and press releases published by the Online NewsAssociation, the Knight Foundation, the Nieman Foundation, and the PoynterInsititute, as well as news articles and opinion pieces hosted in popularforums such as PBS’s MediaShift blog, the American Journalism Review, andthe Columbia Journalism Review. Additionally, we include research reportsfrom the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, theAmerican Press Institute, and Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center forMedia and Democracy. A keyword search for journalism education, digital,analytics, innovation, and multimedia at each organization’s website resultedin more than 200 documents, which we then evaluated for relevance. Thedocuments were culled to 85 after short texts, texts that cataloged only tech-nical changes, or texts that gathered social media postings with little or noadditional commentary were excised from the sample. This body of evidencewas then read in detail to identify recurring themes, patterns, and argumentsthat made assertions about what journalists should do and know. We thenidentified specific statements from the texts that articulated these themesand patterns and offered overt, normative prescriptions for the relationshipbetween technology, journalism education, and newswork, and, ultimately,the individual journalist’s role in mitigating those relationships.

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Imagining the Journalist of the Future 151

ANALYSIS

To show how technology figures into visions of and arguments about thefuture of journalism, our analysis deals with three key aspects: contemporaryconditions, journalist education, and organizational structure. Emerging fromthese three themes is the individual journalist’s ability to grasp the poten-tial of new technologies as a solution for resolving crises facing journalism.Furthermore, commentators identify education and professional organiza-tions as threatened by robust, digitally abetted disruptions that can only beweathered if these organizations are structured in a way that allows idealizedindividual journalists to meet their full potential. The idealized and individu-ated journalist thus comes to act as a point around which critiques circulate,and offers a platform for proposals to change contemporary journalism insti-tutions into the kind that allow technologically savvy journalists to emerge,thrive, and hopefully bring profits back into newsrooms.

Managing contemporary conditions

The texts reviewed tend to frame the future of journalism dichotomously,as a paradigm shift from pre-digital to digital, or industrial to post-industrial(e.g., Anderson, Bell, & Shirky, 2013). They construe the rise of the digital asa disjunctive revolution, rather than an evolution, with the added suggestionthat everything in the digital era is new, and that there is nothing to learnlooking back (except for errors due to lack of foresight). Take, for example,the following quote from Google’s director of news and social products,Richard Gingras (2012, para. 4): “These are extraordinary times. The medialandscape is in the process of being completely transformed, tossed upsidedown; reinvented and restructured in ways we know, and in ways we donot yet know. . . . The pace of technological change will not abate, it willonly quicken.” Within such a context of transformation, individual journalistsneed only look forward and attempt to discern the shape of the future bymastering emerging trends.

A focus on digital technologies dominates perceptions of the newsindustry and its future, as clearly distilled in the words of the KnightFoundation’s Eric Newton (2012b, para. 16): “The digital age is the mostprofound development since movable metal type brought the age of masscommunication. It is changing everything—who a journalist is, what a storyis, which media should be used for which news, and how we engage withcommunities, the people formerly known as the audience.” Others arguethat the use of and reliance upon technology is so pervasive in journalismthat it requires a shift in the ways journalists conceive of the field and them-selves. Royal (2014) suggests that even a required journalism history courseshould begin with the history of computers, networks, and digitization, whileGray (2008) asserts that technology has shifted journalism from its traditional

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role to a “new kind of local information and connection utility” (p. 5).Commentators portray changes as epochal and seismic, thus requiring radicalchanges in the ways in which journalists conceive of themselves.

Despite the focus on technological disruption in the news industry, thearticles invoke, but seldom explicate, terms such as innovation, transfor-mation, engagement, disruption, impact, and interactivity. This conceptualvagueness allows a chaotic vision of journalism’s future to emerge. As cat-aloged by various iterations of PEW’s “State of the Media” reports (PewProject for Excellence in Journalism, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013; Pew ResearchCenter’s Journalism Project, 2014), digital disruptions have created a busi-ness and media production atmosphere filled with uncertainty. Reports fromPEW, Knight, the Tow Center, and others often contain examples of adroitmedia producers attempting to apprehend that uncertainty to bring profitabil-ity to their companies and offer a model for others. It is this apprehensionof chaotic conditions that leads commentators such as Slate’s David Plotz(2014, para. 22) to declare, “But we shouldn’t be blind to all the good newsfor journalism. Things are changing, yes—but in most ways, they’re changingfor the better.”

Most commentators’ optimism hinges upon the unique capabilitiesof individuals to manage contemporary conditions. For example, Benton(2014b, para. 18) argues, “It’s not hopeless; the smartest news companieswill adapt. Bright journalists will figure out how to shape their work fora mobile audience; smart developers will build new experiences to delightreaders; entrepreneurial businesspeople will come up with new ways tomake money on it all.” Such an idealist approach to journalism innovationcasts the individual journalists as a source of value and as people who canconquer chaos in the industry by developing solutions that meet not only theneeds of the news organizations they work for, but the industry as a whole.

Yet, as Willnat and Weaver’s (2014) recent survey of American journalistsworking at newspapers, on the Internet, and at broadcasting outlets attests,many of the rank and file are less sanguine about the conditions they experi-ence. For example, 59.7% of surveyed journalists say the industry is headedin the “wrong direction,” while 62.6% report that their newsrooms haveshrunk, with little sign of new hiring in the future (pp. 3–4). Additionally,68.1% of journalists find themselves seeking new technical training in orderto stay relevant in the field, often at the expense of increased subject knowl-edge of their beats (p. 23). Checks on techno-optimism also occur outsidethe news industry. For example, in her evaluation of disruption as a popularidea, history professor Jill Lepore (2014, para. 9) argues that the concept isfueled by its own tautological inevitability: “Innovation is the idea of progressjammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box. . . . If an established companydoesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt.”When commentators and experts describe digital changes as if they are partof a natural progression, they also render individual agency in the face ofthese changes irrelevant.

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Skills education and new teaching models

As an idealized subject, the technologically savvy journalist offers a norma-tive discursive construct for critiquing journalism education and professionalorganizations alike. For those inside and outside the academy, interven-tions in journalism education produce journalists capable of deployingcontemporary technologies with the curiosity, technical prowess, and self-reliance to create new business opportunities that the current digital momentrequires (Newton et al., 2012; Royal, 2014; Schultz, 2009). Mulligan (2012,para. 12) epitomizes market-oriented concerns when arguing, “Journalismneeds hirable graduates that can create sophisticated visual presentationsand can realize them in code.” Many writers defend their own visions ofjournalism education by arguing that their particular interventions enhancegraduates’ abilities to get jobs after journalism school.

Take, for instance, the teaching hospital model put forward by theCarnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education andmodeled by Arizona State University’s News21 program (Carnegie-KnightInitiative, 2011). The teaching hospital model offers a mix of technical skilland conceptual and ethical acuity by offering journalism students a curricu-lum that integrates them and their coursework into a working newsroomstaffed by professional journalists but housed in a university. Proponentsargue that this curricular model offers “real-world connection” and an edu-cational experience that creates individuals aware of the crisis afflictingjournalism, the technical tools available, and the organizational realities andobstacles that determine the deployment of these resources (Marcus, 2014).The proponents of the hospital model construe other forms of journalismeducation as willfully ignorant of the future (Newton, 2012c; Newton et al.,2012; Kebbel, 2013). Echoing previous criticisms of journalism education dat-ing back more than 100 years, they reveal a view of education that rendersprofessors’ expertise as valuable yet subservient to the pedagogical valueof individual experience: “The changing schools are becoming comfortablewith a kind of reverse mentoring, where smart students teach the profes-sors about the cutting edge digital issues and the teachers help studentsinfuse our great values—the fair, accurate, contextual search for truth—intothe new things they are creating” (Newton, 2012a, para. 58). A technologicalemphasis offers an easy, deterministic solution for concerns about journal-ism’s digital manifestation, as exemplified by Huesca’s (2000) argument, “thatjournalism education be reinvented to develop practices that are congruentwith the imputed properties of cyberspace,” as if technology contains a logicthat mimics its systematic operations and offers an undiscovered path out ofjournalism’s many crises (p. 4). This is not to say that digital technologies donot offer specific affordances for the practice of journalism, but that thesediscourses tend toward unacknowledged technological determinisms.

Although the teaching hospital model offers a means for reconsideringcurricular structure, more detailed debates focus on the particular skills that

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journalists should know. In particular, coding has been celebrated as a skillthat commentators argue journalists should adopt partly because it offers alogical model for journalism’s future. Coding fits within a product-orientedarray of skills: for example, Sinker (2011, para. 6) argues for “more fullyrealized skillsets that include basic coding, an understanding of editorial UX,working with data, and a lot more contextual understanding of storytellingand reporting that is of the web, and not simply an extension of print.”Mulligan (2012, para. 14) links the practical and commercial benefits of cod-ing with the development of students’ cognitive skills: “Learning to programnot only provides a practical skill—it also teaches problem solving. Studentsare learning more precise and nuanced thought processes, and the depth oftheir understanding of information and data will only grow.” Such statementsreveal a vision of journalism’s future where the rules governing the Internet,as a distribution platform, should also govern the ways in which journalismstudents develop.

Learning to code, though, is not just about developing a skill, but man-aging an industrial shift. By developing coding skills, journalists acquire alanguage and product familiarity that allows them to more quickly under-stand the business philosophies driving technology industries. Royal (2014)captures the implicit determinism and oversimplifying fallacy in this philos-ophy when she writes, “Communication is technology, and technology iscommunication” in order to justify coding’s pedagogical value (n.p.). A PBSMediaShift article quoting venture capitalist Fred Wilson uses his words toillustrate the ways in which students should think about the role technologywill play in their careers:

Be technical, get technical, or find people you can be business partnerswith who are. Even if you are not going to do these things by yourself, it’shelpful to learn. . . . It’s better to learn it to talk to technical people, andto evaluate if somebody technical is good or not (as quoted in Benkoil,2011, para. 7).

The article, part of a series entitled “Beyond J-School 2011,” contextualizesWilson’s quote alongside other reporting to argue that contemporary journal-ism education fails to prepare students to turn a profit in media industries byutilizing technology. The article further quotes Wilson as saying that amongtechnology companies, media have been “picked over,” leaving few oppor-tunities for aspiring entrepreneurs (as quoted in Benkoil, 2011, para. 15).Still, the article shows how, as the dominant source of new capital for mediainvestment, the tech industry dictates the terms for talking and thinking aboutjournalism’s future.

While traditionalists and techno-determinists argue for space in journal-ism curricula, optimists package traditional values into contemporary skin.Harner (2011, para. 18) attempts to bring traditional values to bear on digital

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concerns when he writes, “technology is a tool for content delivery, and thatcontent is still very much written, regardless of how it’s delivered.” Froma curricular perspective, the ideal use of technology, then, is to educateindividual journalists so that they are not only competent in technology’sdeployment, but also capable of seeing the traditions and values of journal-ism in new technologies. As Freschette (2013, para. 5) argues, “Programmingis, in the end, a kind of communication. True, programming often meansrelaying information to computers, but that really means we’re communicat-ing with someone via a system they’ve already built.” These notions onlyupdate skills education and keep the vision of journalism education tightlybound to industry needs, as the ideal, technically proficient journalist pre-serves the spirit of journalism regardless of its technical manifestations andits business configuration.

By preserving traditional storytelling values in the face of new technolo-gies, commentators further preserve the role of the individual journalist amidnew routines. In this vein, an understanding of journalism’s essential valuedictates the teaching of technological skills, as modeled in McAdams’s (2012,para. 23) statement that “before we can teach journalism students about codewe have to bring them to a place where they can appreciate what journalistsuse it for.” Those skeptical of academia’s administrative structure questionthe ability of universities to incorporate technology in a way that preservesthese values. “Can universities designed to make slow, incremental, delib-erative and consensual changes respond with the speed, risk-taking andadaptability demanded by today’s technological disruptions?” Kebbel (2012,para. 3) asks. Such questions separate the individual from the institution, andin doing so, claim a space of authority for outside organizations to intervenein university journalism programs’ perceived failings.

The most recent Knight Foundation report, Above & Beyond: Looking atthe Future of Journalism Education (Lynch, 2015), is one of the more stridentinterventions. Instead of looking only at what should be taught and how, thereport argues that the structure of academia is the primary obstacle to robust,technologically driven change taking root in the industry. As Lynch (2015)concludes after interviewing a range of students, editors, young journalismprofessionals, university professors, and journalism school deans:

the common concerns of professionals and academics alike can, inlarge part, be attributed to the rigidity of an academic system inad-equately designed to provide and support the flexibility, immersion,iteration and professional currency that are such necessary attributes ofthe professional preparation of 21st-century journalists (para. 81).

The report identifies accreditation, tenure, and faculty entrenchment as theaspects of academic culture that prevent journalism education from creatingjournalists capable of fully addressing challenges facing the industry. The

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report goes on to portray Lindsey Cook, a data reporter at U.S. News andWorld Report and a recent journalism school graduate from the Universityof Georgia, as the kind of technologically skilled and idealized reporter dis-cussed in this essay and holds her up as an individual underserved by thecurrent curricular structure.

At work here is an industry-centric logic, again putting pressure onacademia to serve its interests. As Lynch (2015, para. 7) states: “Educatorshave much to learn from the conclusions and insights of the professionas it struggles to prioritize and reengineer its policies and practices tobecome more nimble, more competitive, more audience-centered. . . . [I]nother words, to become digital first.” Again, at no time does the report positthe opposite—the profession has something to learn from the way edu-cators approach journalism. Not only does such a focus dismiss scholarlycriticism of the institution and practices of journalism, it seeks new ways tocomport the resources and work of academia to the demands of industry,beyond curriculum and instruction. As Rosen, quoted in the report, argues,the impetus to train students who could easily integrate into journalism’sindustrial production processes obscured, for industry leaders, opportunitiesto “redirect that academic work toward their needs: for research and devel-opment, craft renewal, intellectual liveliness in the day-to-day” (“Appendix:Jay Rosen,” para. 7). What this report and the other documents reveal, then,is a discursive field centered on creating an idealized and technologicallyadept journalist, yet poised to do so by arguing for a fundamental change ininstitutional arrangements in journalism schools, and as the next section willshow, news organizations themselves.

Overcoming organizational obstacles

Despite changes to news technologies and practices over the past decade,criticism persists that the hierarchical structure of news organizations and stri-ated responsibilities of newswork prevents innovation from fully taking hold.As Schultz (2009) states, there exists a persistent tension between legacymedia’s market share, the push to innovate in new directions, and the searchfor market sustainability across digital platforms.

Recent debates about the role of organizational structure tend to focuson the ways in which journalism’s professional culture tends to stymie inno-vation. The recent release of The New York Times report titled Innovation(The New York Times, 2014) acts as a flashpoint for industry-wide concernsabout disruption. The report begins by outlining and tracing the concept ofdisruption historically, as if it were a natural force the organization was failingto manage. Although specific conditions at The New York Times are not ger-mane to this essay, the perception of organizational problems is, especiallyas distilled in the claim that “the newspaper sets the gold standard not justbecause we employ world-class journalists but because we also empower

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them with a world-class support system. But we have not modernized thatsupport system for our digital journalism” (p. 57). The New York Times is abellwether for the industry as a whole, as typified in the observation that “theTimes innovation report represents much more than just a progress reporton the Times’ transition to digital. It reflects the entire industry’s problemswith the changeover” (Potts, 2014, para. 3). The report’s attention to thestructural details of newsroom culture is important, yet also noteworthy isthe focus on Arthur G. Sulzberger’s ability to not only perceive these prob-lems, but also address them as “the publisher’s son and the presumed heir tothe throne. . . . His involvement in the report shows that he understands theissues facing the institution. That speaks well for the Times’ future.” (Benton,2014a, para. 7). Sulzberger, familial connection notwithstanding, is portrayedas valuable for his ability to perceive and strategically change the conditionsat the newspaper.

The Times’s innovation report not only proposes business strategies fordealing with digital changes, it also catalogs obstacles inherent in the orga-nizational culture. The report urges management to “rethink print-centrictraditions,” draws attention to values that cross departments, and mostnotably, recommends the separation of editorial functions from revenue gen-eration (The New York Times, 2014, p. 4). The report notes that the Times’sprofessional culture preserves a “church and state”–style boundary betweenthe editorial and business sides of the paper. Many times throughout thereport, this boundary is identified as a key obstacle to innovations, so thereport’s authors often celebrate the hiring and promotion of individuals capa-ble of crossing the “church and state” division without diminishing the ethicalquality of the news content (The New York Times, 2014, p. 62). Furthermore,developers quoted in the report argue that the division between businessand editorial is an artificial one when dealing with a digital product, becauseindividuals trained in measuring audience engagement should be able tobring their insights to both sides of the business in the interest of developinga profitable news product.

The Times’s innovation report is just one example of a document cele-brating the idealized individual who has the ability to navigate the businesschanges wrought by digital demands. Reports from Columbia University’sTow Center for Digital Journalism attempt to document industrial changeswrought by digital trends, and in doing so define the hard and soft skills thatjournalists need in the digital realm, as well as the competencies necessaryto find success in shifting business environments and audience structures.Anderson et al. (2013) push beyond simple reorganizations of workflowsand offer a means for utilizing digital changes to preserve the value andauthority of journalists:

This will be a world where the biggest changes have come in the roles ofnot full-time journalists, but of the public, where atomized consumption

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and private discussion in small groups have given way to a riot of alter-nate ways of sharing, commenting on and even helping shape or producethe news. All of us are adapting to this changed environment: the existinginstitutions and the new ones, the full-time shapers of the news and thepart-time ones, the generalists and the specialists. And perhaps the singlemost important adaptive trait is to recognize that we are in a revolution,in its sense of a change so large that the existing structure of society can’tcontain it without being altered by it. (p. 117)

But the changes journalists face are also more prosaic and material: as Usher(2014) argues when referencing a growing number of journalists doing theirwork outside of newsrooms, pulling together their stories from co-workingspaces, coffee shops, and even their own cars on their way to breaking news,“a decided detachment from material production has encouraged journaliststo work outside of the newsroom to facilitate the flow of breaking news. . . .Journalists can work from anywhere at any time, and their incremental pro-duction is not visible” (p. 59). In short, because changes in news productionare not readily apparent in the news product and thus seemingly natural tonews consumers, the individuals who incorporate these changes into theirworking routines are more prepared to handle innovation and disruption.

New technologies allow media-savvy citizens and organizations tochallenge the individual journalist’s authority as the definitive source fornewsworthy information, and as Anderson et al. (2013) argue, much of thefocus on technologies in the newsroom is also about reclaiming that lostauthority. “The list of what a journalist can do grows daily, as the plastic-ity of communications technology changes both reporting capabilities andaudience behaviors,” they argue, noting that changing audience access toinformation makes traditional reporting less special and thus more difficultto market as valuable (p. 21). In order to recover this authority, they encour-age individual journalists to develop a new understanding of their value inthe digital world:

Understanding the disruption to news production and journalism, anddeciding where human effort can be most effectively applied, will be vitalfor all journalists. Figuring out the most useful role a journalist can playin the new news ecosystem requires asking two related questions: Whatcan new entrants in the news ecosystem now do better than journalistscould do under the old model, and what roles can journalists themselvesbest play? (p. 21)

By identifying the skills and training that separate professional journalistsfrom amateurs and machines, individual journalists can display their ownvalue in the news production process. For example, “Working between thecrowd and the algorithm in the information ecosystem is where a journal-ist is able to have most effect, by serving as an investigator, a translator,

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a storyteller” (p. 29). In political economic terms, a shifting understandingof what constitutes a journalist also connotes a shift in the ways in whichindividual journalists are understood as valuable.

In these texts, discussion of news organizational structure typicallyreverts to an understanding of the news as “product,” with individual journal-ists deriving their value from their role in the production process (Steinle &Brown, 2012). Obviously, discussions of individual journalists’ branding nodto the overt commodification of journalists and their personalities as part ofa news organizations revenue strategy (Mele & Whibey, 2013; Stencel, Adair,& Kamalakanthan, 2014). With revenue generation necessitating fundamen-tal change, organizations are left with a dual paradox: to create a structurewhere individuals capable of flourishing in this chaos may emerge while alsoextracting the profits that sustain the organization (Gray, 2008).

In many of the texts reviewed for this essay, an idealized field offuture journalists trained to handle technology in all its iterations bridges thegap between organizational disruption and financial sustainability. However,this idealist discourse maintains the precarity of contemporary newsworkwith its core argument that in order to be successful journalists, individualsmust adapt to new roles dictated by technological changes to find eco-nomic opportunity amid the chaos journalism has become. Entrepreneurialin nature, these discourses whisper promises of a self-determined future forthe technologically adroit in one ear, while warning of labor precarity inthe other ear—an acknowledgment that as news institutions are disrupted,any modicum of stability they offered individual workers also begins todisappear.

CONCLUSION

As this essay has argued, debates framing the current situation in jour-nalism as an unforeseen technological revolution completely distinct fromenduring concerns about journalism operate in an ahistorical and atheoret-ical context. The narrowness of these debates thus precludes critiques oflong-standing, systemic issues such as those concerning content, representa-tion, access, policy, and journalism’s ostensible public orientation, as well asissues of diversity in sourcing and the demographics of reporters and editors.Aside from portraying digital shifts as inevitable, these contemporary debatesignore evidence and reports arguing that content changes meant to competewith entertainment media drove readers away before technological shiftstook hold (cf. Patterson, 2013; Weaver et al., 2007). Patterson (2000), usingPEW data from the 1990s, shows that news audiences across all mediumsshrank significantly from 1993 to 2000. He argues that as news organizationsattempted to compete with the rise of cable news, they shifted their hardnews content to softer and more easily consumed story formats, and thus

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drove audiences away. He concludes, “A news habit takes years to createand takes years to diminish but, once diminished, is not easily restored”(p. 15).

The purpose of the preceding essay is not to suggest that journalismschools, organizations, and thinkers should not be concerned with chang-ing technologies and business models, but that prevailing discourses thatexalt technology alone will not solve the industry’s problems. By cele-brating innovation as a vaguely defined value, commentators fail to dealsubstantially with more imperiling and persistent trends that others havedescribed. As McChesney (2013) says, many commentators and analysts“apparently have no idea, after years of experience, how [digital news]operations can ever be sustainable. Foundation officials are reduced torecycling platitudes and buzzwords like those that hedge fund managersare directing at old-fashioned newspaper people on the commercial side”(p. 200).

The way in which innovation, technology, digital disruption, and otherattendant concepts are discussed by the organizations in our study have realconsequences for news organizations’ financial stability, the reality that indi-vidual journalists and journalism students experience and, most important,for the practice of journalism. Arguments about disruption, innovation, andthe individual’s place amid these forces coalesce into a normative discoursethat fails to account for all the ways that journalism education and newsworkhave been shifting for more than a century.

Although we urge against trivializing the very real changes affecting theindustry, we also caution commentators, scholars, analysts, and journalistsagainst adopting a perspective that celebrates technology at the expenseof understanding what this means for the individuals involved in the newsproduction process. As such discourses idealize technologically savvy indi-viduals, they also separate individuals from the institutional relations theyare enmeshed within, and render invisible the forces that continue to makejournalism a precarious profession.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and special issueeditors for their insightful feedback during the development of this essay.

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