El Chronicle of Higher Education anuncia hoy que la Universidad de Northewestern ha aprobado, tras un año de intensa discusión y un conflictivo debate, un nuevo curriculum para su carrera de periodismo en la Medill School of Journalism, que pone al centro las actividades multimediales y el marketing.
Según comenta The Chronicle, el nuevo modelo adoptado por Medill busca responder a los cambios que se están produciendo en el entorno de los medios de comunicación, al declive de la prensa escrita y el surgimiento de la Red.
Los cambios adoptados por la Escuela han provocado una fuerte controversia entre sus alumnos y profesores y entre académicos y observadores externos.
Ver el comentario completo del Chroncile of Higher Education más abajo.
Puede leerse la visión del Decano reformista aquí.

Journalism Dean at Northwestern U. Develops Curriculum With Increased Emphasis on Multimedia and Marketing
By KATHERINE MANGAN
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Friday, July 20, 2007
At a time when newspaper readership is steadily declining and many readers are bouncing from blogs to Internet video to get their news, the new approach will send student reporters out into the field with video iPods and digital camcorders, as well as spiral notebooks. The most controversial change, though, is the increased emphasis on marketing. This fall, lessons in audience behavior and motivation will be taught alongside drills in crafting leads and meeting deadlines. Students will be encouraged to connect with readers by writing out of storefront newsrooms in diverse Chicago neighborhoods.
Some praise the changes as long overdue; others dismiss them as a sellout. But what irks critics the most is the way they were devised. Last year Northwestern’s president and provost announced that they were suspending faculty governance in the journalism school for three and a half years to give the new dean “free rein” to revamp the school.
At the center of the controversy is John Lavine, who became dean in January 2006 after founding and directing Northwestern’s Media Management Center, a center that provides media research and executive education.
He says the faculty has, in fact, spent hundreds of hours working with him to remake the curriculum and that the changes will make Medill’s training more relevant to the 21st century. The curriculum will integrate multimedia techniques and the study of “audience understanding” throughout core courses, and it will focus more heavily on online content.
“It’s not enough to train reporters to write for the evening broadcast news show or for the features section of a daily newspaper,” says Mr. Lavine. “Our job is to create journalists who can win and hold the attention of media consumers faced with limited time and abundant media choices.”
A New Era for Journalism
When he was editor of a daily newspaper in 1964, “nearly 90 percent of the households in that town subscribed to the paper, and people would get up in the morning and read it,” Mr. Lavine says. With one radio station and one television station nearby, he says, “there were only three places you could go to find out whether the world had survived overnight. We assumed that what we were doing was right because everyone turned to us.”
But those days are gone. Now journalists must understand what their audiences are interested in, as well as the best way to grab their attention. The dean believes that Medill is uniquely poised to straddle the line between journalism and marketing since it consists of both a school of journalism and a program in integrated marketing communications.
Critics contend the changes, which affect both undergraduate and graduate-level programs, will dilute the schools’ focus on strong writing and reporting — a charge the dean disputes. They bristle at the informal name change: Since Mr. Lavine took over, the Medill School of Journalism is now referred to simply as the “Medill School.”
Medill’s transformation is being closely watched by journalism schools nationwide, says Thomas Kunkel, dean of the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and the incoming president of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication.
“Medill has always been one of the nation’s leading journalism schools, and the introduction of substantive change is going to be traumatic,” he says. “Every responsible journalism program is trying to ratchet up what it does in the realm of digital journalism and multimedia platforms, but it’s very tricky. Journalism educators don’t have any better idea of where this is heading than the industry does.”
The blending of journalism and marketing is more controversial and viewed by some as “a mingling of priorities that wouldn’t be healthy for journalism,” he says. “Journalists hold that journalists do the content, and the business people do the business, and to the extent possible, they need to work on their own side of the wall so there isn’t a sense that newspapers are writing stories to make advertisers happy and that the publisher isn’t dictating the stories.”
Free Rein Given to Dean
Many faculty members read, in the fall 2006 issue of the university’s alumni magazine, that Mr. Lavine had been granted considerable power at Medill at the same time that faculty oversight was suspended.
The university’s General Faculty Committee unanimously approved a resolution last month calling that move “unacceptable and in violation of the University Statutes.”
The resolution stated that major curricular changes should require deliberation and a vote by the faculty, and it predicted that the suspension would demoralize professors, damage the school’s national reputation, and make it difficult to recruit faculty members. Both the president and provost have declined to comment on the resolution.
Mr. Lavine cites several examples of faculty involvement in the plan, Medill 2020. It was based on a report that the faculty voted on in 2005 that called for, among other things, more emphasis on real-world experience and a better understanding of the audience, he says. Twelve faculty committees each examined a piece of the curriculum last year, and their recommendations shaped the new version. Last spring, all Medill faculty members participated in a 10-week course on producing multimedia reports and integrating the technology into their courses.
“We’ve managed to make enormous, sweeping changes in the past 18 months, and the faculty made it happen,” the dean says.
Objections From Faculty
Skeptics say the committees may have examined small pieces of the puzzle, but the faculty as a whole never had an opportunity to vote on the entire curriculum.
Clarke Caywood, who served on the faculty governing body when the resolution was drafted, believes the dean’s ideas for revamping the curriculum aren’t the problem. “The changes are probably going to be good for the school. What I object to is the process,” says Mr. Caywood, director of Medill’s graduate program in public relations.
But the dean has plenty of support from other professors. David L. Nelson, an associate professor, says his only complaint is that the changes “should have happened a long time ago.”
“Lavine’s on a limited time frame. I wish he would move with as much dispatch as possible and not worry about bruised egos,” Mr. Nelson says. “This is an audience that you can’t win over, so I think he should just go ahead and do it.”
Mr. Nelson says some senior faculty members who have objected to the changes “don’t get the technology” and don’t want to expend the effort learning it. “This is a very interesting time to be a teacher,” he says, “and to put your head in the sand and ignore the changes is wrong.”
In an article published on Northwestern’s Web site last year, Mr. Lavine outlined the goals of Medill 2020, and dealt with questions about whether marketing should have any place in a journalism course.
“Marketing is a tool that can be used for ill if it allows advertisers to influence the news, or it can be used for good if it tells consumers about important news and information they would not otherwise know about,” he wrote.
He expanded on that idea in a lengthy interview with The Chronicle in which he defended the notion that journalists need to understand their audiences: “You can have the finest news story in the world, but if no one reads it, what good is it? No journalist is going to say, ‘I’ve written this great story, but I don’t care if anyone reads it.'”
Meanwhile, alumni and student blogs and listservs have been burning with comments — many of them scathing — about the change in focus at Medill. The dean admits there were bumps in the road as faculty and students learned to navigate the new multimedia equipment, “and we’re taking the complaints seriously.”
Mixed Response From Students
Steve Aquino, a journalism major who will be a senior at Medill this fall, says some students cringe at the dean’s marketing-oriented language, including references to readers and viewers as “consumers.”
“Reporters like to think of themselves as writers rather than manufacturers of goods, and that kind of language is kind of a punch in the gut,” he says. He has mixed feelings about Medill 2020. He likes the idea of learning how to be adept at technology and understanding what makes readers tick, but he objects to the way the plan is being carried out.
“When I first heard about it, it left a sour taste in my mouth,” he says, “but I can see the value of being as versatile and employable as possible when we graduate.” He also objects to the requirement that all incoming students purchase their own laptops, software, video iPods, and digital camcorders, which he says cost around $3,600. The school does not reimburse students for that equipment but considers those expenses when allocating financial aid.
Peter Sachs, who received his master’s degree from Medill in December and is working as a reporter for a daily newspaper in Bend, Ore., , says some of the school’s new emphasis may be misplaced: “The key to my getting a job was not that I could handle an iPod, video camera, and tape recorder all at one time. It was being able to write a complete story on deadline.”
Focus on Versatility
Some professors share his concern, despite the fact that the new version calls for more writing labs for freshmen, as well as more hands-on reporting experience.
“In the sophomore news-writing class I taught, it took the whole 10 weeks to get students to write clearly, without any obviously clumsy constructions,” says Robert McClory, a professor emeritus who still teaches an occasional magazine-writing class at Medill.
“When you throw in all this other stuff — students are not only writing the story, but filming it, editing it, and putting it on the Web — that’s extremely stressful for many professors.”
But Mr. Lavine and his supporters insist that versatility is key in today’s media industry. “Employers are saying, ‘We’re not going to hire people who can only do one of those things when we’re going to do all of those things,” Mr. Lavine says.
“The focus is not the technology,” he continues. “We could be wizards at technology, and it would be a loss if we didn’t tell better stories and have better marketing.”
That doesn’t mean pandering to readers’ basest instincts about what makes a juicy story, according to Mary Nesbitt associate dean for curriculum.
“If you really listen to people, you soon learn that they are not stupid,” says Ms. Nesbitt, managing director of the Media Management Center’s Readership Institute, a think tank that helps daily newspapers increase their readership. People “do want to know about important things,” she says. “They just don’t want it presented in a way that makes it difficult to assimilate.”
Fred Barbash, a lecturer at Medill who spent his career as a reporter and editor at The Washington Post, doesn’t see anything wrong with asking what readers want.
“I don’t think of it as marketing. I think of it as the questions we used to ask in news meetings: Who are we writing this for? Is it intelligible?” That approach isn’t new, he says.
“When I was covering the Supreme Court, my editor would say ‘Barbash, take off your robe.’ That had to be pounded home to me — that I’m not writing for judges and lawyers. I’m writing for the people who have to live with these decisions.”
That message is even more important today, he says. If readers are bored or confused, he says, “all they have to do is Google the topic and five more versions of the same story will appear. You won’t get another chance.”
Copyright © 2007 by The Chronicle of Higher Education