VIVA JOURNALISM!

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Contents

Introduction (Merrill and Lowenstein)................................viiIntroduction to Part I...............................................1Chapter 1. A Child of the Media......................................3Chapter 2. The Challenge of Administration...........................9Chapter 3. Meltdown of the Mass Media................................19Chapter 4. Understanding the Internet................................27Chapter 5. Professional Training vs Liberal Arts.....................33Chapter 6. Expanding the Academic Reach..............................43Chapter 7. Outside Support for Change................................49Chapter 8. Finding Support in the Backyard...........................57Chapter 9. Evaluation as an Agent of Change..........................65Postscript I. Ralph Lowenstein Views the Future......................73Introduction to Part II..............................................83Chapter 10. Places and People........................................85Chapter 11. Training or Education?...................................99Chapter 12. Qualifications...........................................113Chapter 13. Classroom Tactics........................................119Chapter 14. Increasing Specialization................................127Chapter 15. Students and General Semantics...........................135Chapter 16. Non-Professional Professionals...........................143Chapter 17. Existential Journalism...................................149Chapter 18. Moral Guidelines.........................................157Postscript II. John Merrill Views the Future.........................163Index................................................................173

Chapter One

In my youth, our home in Danville, Virginia, always received two weekly magazines, Time and the Saturday Evening Post. In those days, all members of the family read the same magazines, so we had five readers in our household. Since my parents, two brothers and I read the same material, we had news, commentary and even short stories as common material for discussion at the dinner table. When I was about 10 years old, I wrote a poem and submitted it to the Saturday Evening Post. It was rejected. But I was hooked. From that time on, I always wanted to be a journalist (although my mother, like all Jewish mothers in those days, wanted me to be a doctor). My high school journalism teacher, Mrs. Nora Payne Hill, was also chairman of the English Department. She was a strict disciplinarian in the classroom and in the standards she set for staff members of The Chatterbox, our award-winning school newspaper. She selected me as editor in my senior year, and there has rarely been a time during the 62 years since then when I was not writing for publication or broadcasting on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

The one career I never saw in my future was teaching. But I ended up spending 40 years in academe. I laugh wryly to myself when professional journalists comment about journalism teachers, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." How do they think grading student journalism efforts is any different than editing reporter copy? I spent almost 10 years as advisor to a campus newspaper, and that meant time in the slot, figuratively if not actually. During my two years in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, I wrote a weekly column for my hometown newspaper (where I had worked as a reporter before going into the service) and never missed a deadline. I was a reporter and associate editor of the Columbia University daily Spectator during my years in college, had a lengthy article on the textile union published in The Nation during my year at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and re-wrote a novel during the first full semester of my Ph.D. program at the University of Missouri (this while working as publications editor of the Missouri Freedom of Information Center from 8 to 12:30 a.m. each weekday). By the time I mailed the novel's manuscript to my publisher, World Publishing Company, on October 31, 1965, I was operating on fumes. I learned at that point that we all have eight cylinders under the hood, and utilize only five of them most of the time. I needed all eight that semester.

During my teaching years at Missouri, 1968 to 1976, I was book editor of the Missourian (the School of Journalism's daily with citywide circulation) and reviewed a book each week for KBIA-FM (the university's NPRstation). A book a week is a pretty good diet. I discovered that's where the real ideas are, because a book gives one space to support those ideas in detail. For more than 25 years, I wrote and read weekly commentaries for either WUFT-FM or WRUF-AM in Gainesville, Florida, and during six of my 18 years as dean I was a daily fixture on WRUF-AM's "OJ Show." At 7 a.m. each weekday morning, I was "Radio Ralph" or "the Mayor of Henderson Heights," challenging children in the audience with a daily trivia question. We made all parents in the listening audience raise their right hand in the three-finger Boy Scout sign and repeat out loud, "I pledge, under pain of being called a bad egg, that I will not give the answer to my screaming, pleading child." My sponsor was Burger King, and each daily winner got a free adult meal. I also wrote a nationally-syndicated column called "The Media Dean."

As I look back at my early years, I realize that my life has largely been influenced by three factors: 1) a realization in high school that I had good writing skills, 2) the predicament of being a second-generation Jew in a small Southern city where almost everyone else was Christian, and 3) the unusual opportunity to serve as an American volunteer in the Israeli army during that country's War of Independence in 1948 (I was 18 years old and a sophomore at Columbia University at the time).

After completing college and receiving a master's degree from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, I was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War, and wound up at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, instead of Korea. I also met the girl I was going to marry. Since she was going to college in El Paso, I got a job as reporter-photographer for the El Paso Times the day after my discharge from the army. In my third year at the Times, I was asked to fill a part-time vacancy in the Department of Journalism at Texas Western College (now University of Texas at El Paso). The next year, I joined the then two-person faculty full time.

It is not a "given" that any good reporter or editor can shift into college teaching and succeed. Likewise, great editors do not automatically make great journalism deans. The late James W. Carey, who had distinguished careers at both the University of Illinois and Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, once said the following:

Life in a university has its special qualities, opportunities, failings and strengths and makes unique demands. I frequently fall into a conversation with, say, an editor from Newsweek who says, "Oh, you teach up there at Columbia. That's interesting because when I retire from journalism I am going to teach." To which I reply: "That's interesting because when I retire from education I am going to edit Newsweek." He is appalled at the...