Young bloggers respond to Peter Funt's column

David Spett, who funds and trains student journalists for the Center for American Progress, said journalism training offers young people valuable skills:

The decline of student journalism has been in the works for decades. I don't agree that high school journalism courses are the only way to train the next generation, particularly since the current one has, with limited exceptions, shirked its most basic responsibilities. But the skills—interpersonal, management, technological and ethical—taught through journalism are useful to innumerable situations in life.

Journalism is a uniquely efficient, effective way to teach young people to handle conflicting interests, meet deadlines, manage a staff, and hold their school and local officials' feet to the fire. I see no silver bullet as we determine where the next generation of journalists will come from; we don't even know where they will go to, if anywhere at all. But journalism provides certain practical, real-world experiences that can't be replicated in class, or on athletic field, or even through jobs and clubs.

Ned Resnikoff, a freelance journalist and graduating NYU student, thinks that the tightly structured nature of a journalism class isn't the best venue in which to learn the craft:

It would surely be a loss if high school students stopped learning the craft, tools and trade of journalism, but I can't bring myself to mourn the passing of journalism classes from the high school curriculum. No reasonable observer in a democratic society would call a state-run newspaper a good source for responsible journalism, and by the same token I don't think high school students should learn about journalism by reporting on their school for a school-funded publication over which the faculty has final editorial control.

When I was a student at Middletown High School in Connecticut, the budget for the paper came entirely out of the ads we sold to local businesses, and while the principal had final cut on stories, it was a mere formality—and one that could be vetoed by a panel that included the author of the story, the editor, the head of the school board and the faculty adviser. That's not to say that the paper was written and published without guidance; all of our business was conducted under the supervision of a faculty adviser who was a seasoned veteran both of public school teaching and newspaper reporting. I learned more about the ins and outs of the craft from him than I ever would have gotten in a controlled classroom environment, especially because we were acting with neither the cage nor safety net of censorship.

Matt Zeitlin, a sophomore at Northwestern and an editor at North by Northwestern, thinks Funt is conflating two separate issues:

Though Peter Funt and I have never had the pleasure of meeting, I must haunt his dreams. I started my own blog when I was 17 and have used that "glorious freedom" to opinionate, analyze and blather (but not do any reporting!) since then. To add insult to injury, I go to Northwestern and write for a campus publication, but I do opinion pieces about national politics, thus voiding the need for the skills acquired and taught in the intensive journalism classes that define our prestigious Medill School of Journalism.

I did, however, write for my high school newspaper and help edit it. It was there where I learned what the structure and content of a good news story looked like—or should I say, re-learned. Like any aspiring writer, I read newspapers, magazines, blogs and books incessantly and so when one of the seniors taught us the famous inverted pyramid diagram of a news story, I was just learning a different way of describing something I had known about for a long time: the structure behind a readable and useful newspaper story.

But I've never taken a college journalism class and I have no plans to. Is there something wrong? Funt confuses two things that seem similar: doing journalism and learning it. Although university journalism schools have indeed expanded, it's unclear if they are anything more than profit and prestige centers for universities. After all, at any decent-sized college or university, there will likely be a plethora of journalism opportunities for undergraduates, journalism school or no.

And yes, undergraduates who wrote for or edited their high school newspaper will be at an advantage, but those inequities can be rectified by four years of pursuing opportunities to do journalism in college. And it's there where we should focus our attention. We already have an unfortunate surplus of credentialism and expanding it hardly seems wise. So I don't think we should care whether or not future freshmen will have trouble "succeeding in college journalism courses"—we should worry about whether or not they have the opportunities to do journalism.

And Emily Rutherford, a sophomore at Princeton University majoring in history, doesn't regret not taking formal journalism classes in high school:

It's a great tragedy that, as public school systems across the country face huge budget shortfalls and thus the cutting of any curricular and extracurricular offerings not directly related to reading, writing, and arithmetic, a wide variety of institutions—from orchestra, band, and choir to theater to journalism—must bite the dust. A high school education should be about much more than the skills needed to pass a standardized test, and students who, say, learn writing skills in an English class should have the chance to put them to use when writing for the school paper.

And yet, when I recollect the very low quality of my own high-school paper, I can't help but think that it wouldn't be a great tragedy if the school no longer had the funds to print copies. Despite having a journalism class in which to learn the tools of the trade, the students who worked on the paper apparently never learned not to fabricate quotes and not to represent staged photographs as candid. If such classes are destined to be as poorly taught and managed as they were at my high school, I'd rather see scarce resources be directed toward new books for the library, which hadn't seen a new acquisition in nearly ten years.

Electing not to take journalism in high school, I learned how to write through reading good literature and through practicing with my own blog, which (if the countless new blogs created daily is any indication) seems to be the way that literary output is headed these days. To be sure, I had to learn how to craft a lede and how to overcome my fear of the telephone on my own, and these are both fundamental aspects of the craft with which I still struggle. But learning how to write on a blog—with all the genre's emphasis on developing one's own voice, and with explaining and analyzing concisely and precisely—has prepared me for today's web journalism in a more constructive way than a high-school journalism class possibly could have.