Journalists have always told tales. Aspiring reporters wish to learn how to fashion truth into compelling narrative. But something’s happened. The industry’s shattering, the public is turning away from mainstream media, and today’s young journalists feel under intense pressure to become Scheherazades, to cling to their fickle audience by any means necessary because failure will cost them their lives.
Medill’s home page is evidence of the disconnect. It now introduces the school in the kind of pretentious gibberish old-fashioned journalists despise: “ENGAGING the AUDIENCE with relevant, differentiated storytelling & messages.” Stronger evidence is a resolution passed a month ago by Northwestern’s General Faculty Committee condemning Medill for its “violation of faculty governance . . . in violation of the University’s Statutes” and predicting “damage to the national reputation of the School.” You’ll find a more in-depth discussion of that resolution in a June 22 post on my Reader blog; the comments that follow it, most from Medill students and graduates, convey the rising tide of discontent.
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Nesbitt probably has a point. But then we get back to nomenclature. Product from both the Chicago and D.C. bureaus of the Medill News Service is now identified on the Medill Web site as Medill Reports. The name was already in use to identify the weekly news show produced by broadcasting students. Nesbitt likes the repetition. She wants to get away from the “news service” tag altogether.
“We still refer to it as ‘news service,’” she said. But “I’ve gone through all kinds of discussions and brainstorming about a better name that’s more active and more, sort of, expressed the richness of what it is our students are actually doing.
William Gaines hasn’t let go of Deep Throat. A Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter for the Tribune (twice) and now a journalism professor at the University of Illinois, Gaines set out in 1999 to figure out the identity of Bob Woodward’s Watergate supersource. In 2003 Gaines and a team of student investigators announced that Deep Throat was Fred Fielding, a White House attorney under President Nixon. Two years later Vanity Fair reported and Woodward then admitted that it was actually Mark Felt, associate director of the FBI.
