TEACHING JOURNALISM HISTORY TO JOURNALISTS

This article is rooted in the experience of helping to develop and introduce a range of required and elective journalism-history courses into a professional school whose jam-packed one-year curriculum has always been dominated by hands-on training in the skills and techniques of the craft. Some of the challenges have been practical and logistical. We decided early on, for instance, that all assignments would involve reading or viewing works of journalism, not secondary sources, but it was harrowing to have to choose no more than three dozen or so pieces to represent three centuries' worth of evolution. And since our limited time required us to focus mainly on journalism history in the United States, we had to decide how elaborately to explain events like the US Civil War that American students had studied from the cradle but that some of our international students could not date within a half-century. But the most interesting, and rewarding, aspect of these courses was watching the changes in the students' thinking about the complexities and conundrums of their chosen profession: the achievements and also the missteps of their predecessors, the contingency of conventions and the mutability of values, the ideas about what journalism is for and how it should be judged. We have not won all of them over yet on the need to spend some of their precious time every week on a course that will not directly contribute to getting them a job. But we do make them think more widely about what that job means. This article charts the institutional and intellectual challenges in constructing a suitable history syllabus at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.