Viva Journalism!
The Triumph of Print in the Media Revolution
by
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Introduction
This is a discussion of the future of journalism and journalism education by two journalism educators with more than 100 years of combined experience in teaching and administration, most of it at two of the largest and best-known schools of communication in the nation, the University of Missouri and the University of Florida. We hope what we have to say will be of interest to journalism educators and media practitioners in all fields – newspapers, radio, television, cable, motion pictures and books. We hope it will also be interesting to average educated persons who spend most of their waking hours consuming the mass media while understanding very little about what makes these media tick.
Simply put, we think many media moguls have abused their fiduciary responsibility to maintain the financial strength and credibility of the press. We believe that few university presidents understand the important relationship between journalism education and political democracy. We describe the chain of neglect that has led to press insolvency, staff unemployment and J-school misdirection. Conventional wisdom to the contrary, we believe print journalism will be the strongest form of journalism well into the future, although perhaps a new word is needed for “print,” since we mean the printed word on any surface: stone, paper, cathode ray tube or silicone slate.
This is not a typical academic book. We eliminated footnotes, giving ourselves the widest opportunity to observe trends, faults and the future of the field. We are not novices to the business of writing books. John Merrill has written or co-authored 30. Ralph Lowenstein has written or co-authored five. We believe that in the future a book will look nothing like the one you hold in your hand right now. But it will still be a book -- not a DVD, CD or iPod. “Print,” the written word on whatever surface, is the essential tool of the decision-maker and busy person. Print is ubiquitous, portable, retrievable and informative. We happen to believe the future “surface” of most print will be something like the Kindle or Sony Reader – we call it an “s-slate” (for silicone slate). We also believe that readers will actually pay for information they receive by Internet or directly from satellite, but this is inconsequential to our belief that print will be the dominant form of information delivery.
Because so many in traditional “print” journalism fields have seen the written word as only ink and paper, rather than the alphabet on any surface, their publications lost circulation. In the last few years that decline has become a free fall. In this book we will tell how that happened. In another book we co-authored (Media, Messages and Men, David McKay Co., 1971), we predicted this media revolution and the eventual disappearance of print on paper as a mass medium. Ironically, the Lowenstein-Merrill book won the Professional Journalism Society’s Distinguished Service Award that year for the best book in the field of “Research about Journalism,” but few members of the press read the book, or took heed of the prediction.
Also little pondered by professional journalists are the elements of journalistic ethics, categorized and analyzed by John Merrill, or the lessons to be learned from a scholarly examination of the foreign press, another area of study in which Merrill pioneered.
Journalism education, unknown to most university curricula seventy years ago, is now burgeoning with students at virtually every college of higher learning in the country. But journalism education’s ties to professional journalism are more problematic than at any time in its history, and there is an unfortunate lack of self-examination about this tragic disconnect in both academe and the mass media. Ernst Cramer, an executive with Die Welt of
The University of Missouri, the oldest school of journalism in America, celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2008, and the second-oldest school, Columbia University, marks its centennial in 2012. Ironically, precisely in the week during which it celebrated its centennial, the Missouri School of Journalism revealed that its laboratory newspaper, the Columbia Missourian, was in serious financial trouble. It was losing $1,100,000 a year and had paid circulation of 1,200 copies a day. It would have to recreate itself in order to survive as a community newspaper.
And, in a way, The Columbia Missourian was in a favorable position. It had plenty of reporters (journalism students) and editors (journalism faculty) and a building (Lee Hills Hall). But its low overhead was more than matched by a low circulation and inadequate advertising revenue. It was decaying on the journalistic vine.
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About the Book
In a previous book, John Merrill and Ralph Lowenstein were the first journalism academics in America to predict, correctly, that newspapers and magazines as we know them would soon disappear, to be replaced by digitized products. Drawing on their long experience in journalism and journalism education, they lay out in this book their observations, suggestions and predictions – not only for the American media, but for the education of future journalists.
They believe many media moguls have abused their fiduciary responsibility to maintain the financial strength and credibility of the press. They believe few university presidents understand the important relationship between journalism education and political democracy. They describe the chain of neglect that has led to press insolvency, staff unemployment and J-school misdirection.
They believe print journalism will be the strongest form of journalism well into the future – although the “print” will not be on paper. It will be on what the authors call an “s-slate,” silicon slate, and they believe that every individual from kindergartner to senior citizen will a personal s-slate in the future to retrieve and read books, magazines and newspapers. Merrill and Lowenstein assert that readers of the s-slate will pay for everything they read.
About the Author
The two authors have a combined journalism practice and teaching background of some 100 years. John C. Merrill is the author or co-author of 30 books and holds a coveted Honor Medal from the University of Missouri a distinguished career in teaching. Ralph L. Lowenstein is past president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the largest association of journalism professor and administrators in North America.
A native Mississippian, Merrill's background in journalism includes work as a wire editor, feature writer, and columnist. He began his university teaching career in 1951 and until 2000 had taught at some half dozen universities, including 26 years at the School of Journalism, University of Missouri, and three years as director of the School of Journalism, Louisiana State University. He holds an MA in philosophy from Missouri and a Ph.D. in mass communication from Iowa. After he stopped teaching at Missouri in 2000, he was a visiting professor in Singapore and in Cairo, Egypt, and at Elon University in North Carolina, the University of North Carolina, and at Northwestern State University (Louisiana) where he first taught back in 1951. His best-known books are The Imperative of Freedom, The Dialectic in Journalism, Legacy of Wisdom and Media Debates (with Everette Dennis).
Ralph L. Lowenstein was dean for 18 years of the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications, the second-largest J-school in the U.S. and the pioneer program in America in development of the Internet newspaper. He holds a master’s from the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Missouri. Before entering journalism education, he was an award-winning reporter for newspapers in Virginia and Texas. He taught at the University of Texas-El Paso, and headed journalism departments at Tel Aviv University and the University of Missouri. He was a media critic for the CBS Morning Television News from 1975 to 1976, and wrote a nationally-syndicated column, “The Media Dean.”
Merrill and Lowestein have collaborated on two previous books. As co-authors of Media, Messages and Men: New Perspectives on Communication, (David McKay Company, 1971), they received the Society for Professional Journalists’ Distinguished Service Award for Research about Journalism.