Diversity 2.0: Recruiting a new, tech-savvy, generation of journalism students

July 16, 2010

Diversity 2.0: Recruiting a new, tech-savvy, generation of journalism students

By Robert Niles
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I don't need to explain to journalism educators the importance of recruiting and admitting a diverse student body. Journalism educators realized, more than a generation ago, that graduating few other than white, middle-to-upper-income students would not well serve the economically and racially diverse, internationally-flavored communities that journalists are called to report upon and serve.

But as journalism continues to respond to the second decade of the Internet revolution, it should be apparent to all in our field that ethnic, racial and economic diversity isn't enough any longer. Journalism education needs to accommodate, and welcome, students whose skills sets and interests range far beyond the stereotype of math-phobic storytellers.

With the Internet enabling so many new ways to connect the public with information relevant to their lives, the news industry needs to bring more people with entrepreneurial initiative, community organizing skills and computer programming experience into our journalism schools. Notice that I used "the news industry" as the subject of my previous sentence. We cannot afford to leave this task to universities alone - industry, foundations and even individual news entrepreneurs must support the effort to further diversify the population of students studying journalism.

Fortunately, some visionary journalism educators are showing us the way to bring students with more sophisticated technical backgrounds into the news business. Earlier this year I spoke with Northwestern University's Rich Gordon about the effort at the Medill School of Journalism to recruit and develop programmer/journalists.

Full disclosure: I graduated from Northwestern as an undergraduate, though I did not attend Medill. My major was in the university's Honors Program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences, which involved a great deal of work in statistics and computer data modeling. Donna Leff of Medill, whom I served with on a university task force, tried to recruit me to Medill's graduate school, so I suppose Northwestern's traditional of recruiting math techies isn't something new. (For what it's worth, Professor Leff's arguments did convince me to pursue a career in journalism, though I attended Indiana University for my master's degree instead.)

At Northwestern, Medill is developing courses in the application of computer programming to practice the journalism, and backing that up with a Knight Foundation-funded initiative to offer full scholarships to students with programming and computer science backgrounds to enroll in the school's master's degree program.

"I think a big part of the key for the future of journalism to to attract people into our school who don't fit a traditional profile," Gordon said. "I'd say that about programmers, I'd say that about game developers, I'd say that data analysts. There are all kinds of people with skills that are now clearly relevant to journalism who have not historically looked at that as a place to exercise their interests."

Northwestern has graduated three such students with six more on track to graduate this summer or fall.

"What we've seen with the [programming] students we've had so far, they really get excited by [journalism]," Gordon said.

"The feedback I've gotten from faculty is that these students have done well in their classes, and they enriched the classes by bringing different perspectives."

It's those differing perspectives that can make such a profound impact upon journalism education, including on even those "traditional" students who might not have considered the possibilities of different ways to communicate information, beyond text and visual narratives.

"We need to get the students who fit the typical profile of journalism students to get excited about this sort of stuff," Gordon said. He told me about one "traditional" Medill graduate student who was so inspired by her programmer-classmates, and what they were doing with news and information, that she decided to stay an extra quarter to develop a programming project as independent study. That ultimately led to an internship on the Los Angeles Times' data reporting team.

"We know what the learning ladder looks like for text, and we're all figuring out what the ladder looks like for video and audio and photos and slideshows," Gordon said. "It's not yet clear what that ladder should be for programming, which seems odd given that people have been teaching programming in books and classes for years. But if we're going to get journalism students excited by [programming] we need to innovate in how we teach it within a journalism curriculum, to get journalism students past whatever hurdles and frustrations traditional coders have gotten past but that might make a journalism student give up rather than get through."

"You can get someone launched into this field [programming journalism] if they have some aptitude and interest," Gordon said. "Most of the people who are doing this now didn't learn this in classrooms; they learned it by doing it. The most important thing you can do in a journalism school is to give students a taste sufficient to get over feeling that 'I can't do this' or 'I feel frustrated when I can't get it to work' and then give them the confidence that they can teach themselves or even take classes elsewhere in the university."

They key, ultimately, is to have people with a programming background in the mix, to provide the example and the inspiration that can motivate curious journalism students… and even faculty.

Getting those different voices into our conversations start with one-on-one chats, such as Professor Leff had with me (*cough* *cough*) years ago. But ultimately, we need to put money where our mouths are and offer students with different skills the scholarships that make explicit our commitment to including them in our field, as Northwestern (through Knight's help) is doing.

Diversifying our industry may seem difficult when so many traditional news organizations are downsizing, cutting off entry to those programmers, game developers, community organizers and business innovators that our industry desperately needs. But if we do not find places for these voices, and for their skills, the erosion within traditional newsrooms will grow worse, as they continue to fail to develop the communication innovations that our industry needs.

Fortunately, traditional print and broadcast newsrooms aren't the only places to work in journalism anymore. Online entrepreneurs, including many former print and broadcast journalists, are beginning to offer new employment opportunities for journalism graduates, as well. These entrepreneurs understand the importance of cultivating this diversity of talent and voices, and journalism schools would do well to help them do that.

I believe that the need to diversify journalism schools' student bodies in this way is the most important issue facing journalism education today. That's why I'm looking forward to continuing this conversation with people at other institutions over the next several months. I'd like to talk about diversification to include not simply programmers, but also community organizers and entrepreneurs as well.

So if you're involved in an effort to bring these types of students into journalism education, or would like to be, please drop me a line at robert (at) robertniles.com. We need to share our stories.

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