Watching journalists become journalists

The fall semester is well underway, and I have settled back into the familiar rhythm of classes, deadlines and stacks of student copy waiting to be edited.

I teach four classes this semester, which marks the beginning of my sixth year at the university. Six years is long enough that I can no longer get away with calling myself “the new guy.”

By Austin Lewter, director, Texas Center for Community Journalism

It is also long enough to have watched students arrive on campus unsure of themselves, develop into reporters and writers, walk across the stage and, in many cases, take their places in professional newsrooms.

For someone who has spent much of his career in community journalism, that may be the most interesting part of teaching journalism: You get to watch journalists being made.

I get a particularly vivid reminder of that every Tuesday and Thursday.

My teaching day begins with a sophomore-level news gathering and writing course. It is a core class for communication majors and, for many students, their first serious introduction to AP Style. Most are sophomores, although there is an occasional freshman. One of those freshmen this semester was a high school senior just six months ago.

Think about that.

Six months ago, she was finishing high school. Today, she is learning how to approach a stranger, ask questions, verify information, write a lead and put her name on a story that someone else will read.

Those things sound basic to those of us who have spent years in newsrooms. We forget they are not.

Nobody is born knowing how to conduct an interview. Nobody instinctively understands why attribution matters, why names must be spelled correctly or why you call someone back when the numbers don’t add up.

And nobody arrives in a newsroom already understanding that an editor covering a story in red ink isn’t trying to destroy a writer’s self-esteem.

Those lessons must be learned somewhere.

A few hours later, I teach a junior-level feature writing class. The difference is noticeable.

These students generally know their way around a basic news story. They have interviewed people. They have met deadlines. They have had their writing critiqued enough times to understand that “good enough” and “finished” are not necessarily the same thing.

Now the questions begin to change. Internships matter. Portfolios matter. Clips matter. Students begin asking fewer questions about what they need to do to pass a class and more about what they need to do to get a job. That is an important transition because journalism stops being merely an academic exercise.

The audience becomes real.

So do the consequences.

Then comes my final class of the day — digital journalism, a new senior-level course we added to the curriculum this year.

By late afternoon, I am working with students approaching the other end of their college experience. Many returned this fall from summer internships in professional newsrooms. They have covered real stories for real audiences under real deadlines. They have dealt with editors, sources and the occasional assignment that didn’t go according to plan. About half will graduate in December. Most of the others should follow in the spring.

They are no longer talking abstractly about becoming journalists.

They are about to become our colleagues.

And somewhere during one of those long teaching days, it occurred to me that I was watching several years of professional development compressed into a few hours.

In the morning, I am teaching someone who was in high school six months ago how to write a news lead.

By midafternoon, I am talking with students about internships, clips and portfolios.

By the end of the day, I am talking with seniors about graduation, job applications and where they might be working a few months from now.

Same building. Same professor. Same profession.

Very different places along the road.

For those of us already working in journalism, there is a lesson in that progression.

We spend a lot of time talking about the future of our profession.

We talk about shrinking staffs, changing business models, artificial intelligence, social media, audience fragmentation and the seemingly endless list of challenges facing news organizations.

Those conversations are necessary.

But sometimes our discussions about journalism’s future become so focused on platforms, technology and economics that we forget the most obvious component of that future:

People.

Someone still has to report the school board meeting.

Someone still has to ask the follow-up question.

Someone still has to know when the numbers in a budget don’t make sense.

Someone still has to sit across from a grieving family and understand that getting the story right matters more than getting it first.

Someone still has to develop relationships with sources, understand a community and earn the trust of readers.

And somewhere right now, the person who will do those things is sitting in a journalism classroom trying to figure out how to write a lead.

That should matter to those of us already in the business.

The transition from journalism student to professional journalist does not happen overnight. It happens incrementally. A student who is terrified to conduct an interview eventually learns to ask the uncomfortable follow-up question. A writer who takes every edit personally eventually understands that good editing is an act of collaboration. A student who struggles to make deadline eventually discovers there is rarely such a thing as the perfect story, but there is definitely such a thing as a late one. And the student who once needed 45 minutes to write a lead eventually walks into a newsroom and files on deadline without thinking twice about it.

I have changed during those six years, too.

When I arrived at the university, I was learning the institution just as my students were. I was figuring out systems, expectations, names and, probably most importantly during those first few weeks, where I was supposed to park.

Today, some of the students I first knew as nervous underclassmen are working journalists. That is one of the great privileges of teaching this profession. You get a front-row seat to other people’s progress.

But it also comes with a responsibility that extends beyond journalism schools. If we want talented young people to enter this business — and stay in it — you must make room for them. You must offer internships that involve more than fetching coffee and rewriting press releases. You must to give young reporters meaningful assignments. You must edit them without discouraging them. You must explain not only what they got wrong, but why it matters. And every once in a while, you should probably tell them when they got something right.

Journalism professors can teach reporting, writing, ethics, multimedia skills and all the other things we cram into a curriculum. But eventually, we must hand our students over to the profession.

They need editors willing to teach them.

They need publishers willing to take a chance on them.

They need veteran reporters willing to answer questions they may have answered 100 times before.

Because none of us entered this business knowing everything we needed to know.

Someone taught us. Someone edited us.

Someone gave us an assignment we weren’t entirely sure we could handle and expected us to figure it out.

Someone gave us our first byline.

Six years into teaching, I can’t call myself the new guy anymore.  But every Tuesday and Thursday, I get to spend a day watching students move through different stages of becoming journalists. By the end of that day, the freshmen remind me where journalists begin. The seniors remind me where they are headed. And all of them remind me that, for all the uncertainty surrounding this profession, its future is still walking into classrooms every semester.

Your job is to make sure there is a newsroom waiting for them when they walk out.

Austin Lewter is executive director of the Texas Center for Community Journalism, based at Tarleton State University. He also serves as instructor of journalism at the university and faculty adviser for the Texan News Service and J-TAC newspaper. Additionally, he is a working owner and publisher of several Texas weekly newspapers.