Farrar is right, rite, write; letter to us
The article by Dean Ron Farrar published in the winter edition of the Journalism Alumni News is worth some Old Grad introspection.
The work of schools of mass communication seems clear: to teach the discipline of defining a thought and refining the thought into words to be conveyed to an audience.
It's sad that this skill is so little regarded and little rewarded. Farrar is right. Little is done to promote "journalism." Academics dwell on esoteric material. Practitioners duck their heads and turn out copy. No one points to the skill with admiration..
True, there are few places to point. I read three daily newspapers, leave a radio on much of the day, scan offerings delivered to my home by cable and troll the Internet. I despair the quality of writing in the products I read, hear and view.
A nation of readers has become a nation of viewers. It's painful to one who loves words. For example, homophones abound in printed columns - "isle" for "aisle," for example or "do to" for "due to" or "passed events" instead of "past events." I won't expound on the split infinitives, misplaced modifiers or vagabond adjectives offered by today's communicators and overlooked by today's editors.
No wonder people such as Farrar's provosts ask what goes on in J school. Evidently it takes no special skill to write for public media. Anyone can do it.
Of course, anyone can do it. Not everyone can do it well.
Quality writing is astonishingly rare. In part this is because the bean counters who manage newsgathering and publishing operations don't reward it. They find flabby, long-winded writing fills pages and airtime more efficiently than skillful tight writing and at less cost. Thus, it is counterproductive to pay skilled writers when unskilled writers produce the required volume. And after all, anyone can do it.
When is the last time you saw a reporter pace the newsroom, searching his mind for the words to represent exactly the meaning he sought? When is the last time you remember a desk editor sending copy back for a rewrite?
Communication requires skill, discipline and responsibility. "That's good enough," is not good enough.
I don't question the need for education in mass communication. The university granted me a bachelor of arts degree and a certificate in journalism in 1951. The Army required two years of my time so I began newspapering in 1953, a time when journalism school graduates got little respect. Old hands saw that "the college boy" got scholarly assignments such as meetings of the library guild and historical society.
My dream was to edit a daily newspaper someplace, anyplace, where I could inform and sometimes astonish the readers. My goal was to provide a report so complete that readers would not have to look elsewhere to find out what was going on. My intent was to have influence beyond the circulation area. My inspiration was a city editor who told his reporters each day: "Gentlemen, (There were hardly any women in newsrooms in those days.) today we are going to tell the readers everything we know for sure."
The J schools' role is to inspire students to tell readers - all right, and listeners and viewers - everything they know for sure, in the clearest, most concise way they can.
Rod Riggs
Lake Arrowhead, Calif.
March 2003
