12 Journalism 1(1)

Michael Schudson concludes the symposium by calling for the variegated

study of journalism around the globe, particularly emphasizing broad histor-
ical and comparative perspectives that have been underdeveloped in much of
the existing journalism scholarship. He makes the point that news has always
created some kind of virtual community, yet cable television and the internet
are diminishing the function of public inclusion that is so central to journal-
ism’s perseverence.
And so I ask: do these scholars have reason to be concerned? Not if we
heed their call for a new and invigorated study of journalism that will heal
journalism’s wounds and facilitate its revitalization. We have our work cut out
for us; the charter of JournaIism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, as suggested by
each of these contributors, is clear: study journalism in all of its contexts and
in so doing embrace a wider range of theoretical perspectives, cultural and
historical circumstances, and research methodologies. If JournaIism can do its
part to make journalism’s study flourish precisely along the lines laid out
within the pages of this symposium, we may have less reason to be concerned
than we originally thought.

Some personal notes on US journalism education

! James W. Carey
Columbia University

W.H. Auden somewhere says that ‘a poem is a contraption with a person

hidden inside’. Poems are compacted stories, the most elevated of compacted
stories because they come from the most disciplined of the narrative arts.
What follows are some stories that barely hide me inside – stories of observa-
tions provoked by experience of journalism education at Columbia and the
University of Illinois and for briefer periods at many of the journalism schools
in the United States.
When I first entered an American journalism education in 1957, it was a
very fragile enterprise indeed. Faculties were typically small and, with some
notable exceptions, undistinguished. They had little background in higher
education having come from small regional newspapers after modest pro-
fessional careers and were ill-at-ease in the foreign and generally hostile
environment of the academy. I generally found them admirable as people and
dedicated as teachers. In fact, the teaching of journalism has been marked by
a disciplined seriousness of method – unusual in the modern university –
however thin and impoverished the subject matter. The student body was
small also, though still too numerous for the size of the faculty, and no one
was certain they would show up every Fall. One dean at the time would