That old-time journalism

Classes begin today at the community college (Grossmont College in El Cajon, near San Diego)where I teach journalism.

It is the beginners’ course, pure, unadulterated Journalism 101, and I will teach it the same way I taught it 10 years ago, and the same way I learned it 35 years ago.

My goodness, journalism has changed in 35 years. The newspaper where I began my career was still using linotypes, mats and printing plates, and computers were still huge machines in large rooms with carefully controlled air conditioning.

Many changes in journalism have been for the better, and many changes have been for the worse, and it is the second set of changes that gets all the headlines these days. The news media is under attack from the left, the right, the government, academia, the intelligentsia, and most every online pundit in the blogmos.

The attacks are mostly political and mostly economics-driven. For example, one influential poll suggests that 79 percent of Americans believe that a news organization would be in no hurry to run stories about a corporation that was one of the organization’s heavy advertisers.

And that’s just corporations that are advertisers. Since corporations now own many of the most visible and influential news organizations, you see how the public mistrust can grow.

But that’s all politics and economics. Something is going to have to be done about the effects of economic competition on news organizations, and it will.

The news, however, has not changed. The three cardinal rules of journalism have not changed, nor have the three priorities. The definition of news is the same as it was 16,000 years ago, at the birth of media. The news values have changed somewhat, as people have changed. Sex is an outright news value now, whereas 40 years ago sex was officially taboo. The prominence value has changed, too. It is much more prominent in a nation of celebrity worship.

And so we take that into account. But at the end of the day, news is still the result of raw information that journalists are sent to investigate, to see if news is there. My class begins with analysis of raw information because that is where the news begins. If the analysis shows that news is there (and by far, most raw information is not news), we move on to organizing the information, using the classic Inverted Pyramid model, and then we write the information into a story, using short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

First we learn to do this for newspapers, and then for television (I wish we had time in the semester for radio, but we don’t). Time and again, I tell my students it is totally necessary that they know how to write for both print and broadcast, because the two are rapidly converging on the World Wide Web.

It starts again today. The news about journalism has changed, but the way that news is written has not, and won’t be, if it is to remain believeable. And where news is not believeable, a democracy, with all its colleges and universities, can't exist.