Does Dvorak Speak the Truth?

Catching up on my podcasts, and TWIT got off in a rat hole about the value of J-School. John C. Dvorak adds this quip:

"I don't know what the value of it would be to a blogger, that you couldn't get elsewhere. . . . There's nothing like on the job training, and taking a bunch of graduate courses in journalism is different than getting a job at a newspaper or someplace where a bunch of people are yelling at you."

Something to be said for that. Hard to simulate that pressure; frankly, I found a of students aren't interested in being pushed in a classroom setting. That is, until they come back later and tell you that the best thing that happened was the chance to make a mistake under pressure when it didn't count for their jobs.

The reason Leo and company got off on this was a rise in J-School enrollment nationwide. Dvorak continued:

"The problem is in the United States that most of the people want to think of journalism as a profession where in the rest of the world, in England in particular, it is a trade. . . . It's not rocket science."

One of the guests made an interesting point -- the upturn is because more people are blogging and getting a taste of what journalism can be; that the net media is making things "a bit sexier than it use to be."

Um, hotter than taking down POTUS? Please, nothing approaches the Woodward and Bernstein years of being the next great crusader. Wil Harris chimed in:

"Taking a postgrad journalism course at this point is mental. Just take a job and getting any kind of freelance . . . is far more valuable than getting a grad course."

Dvorak closes with an interesting theory that J-School started back in the day to create "cogs for the wheel -- a neutral writing style with no voice" that allows people to fit into any paper, any where. Training like a lawyer to do a job anywhere, Dvorak continues, "and this is the controversial part . . . the fact is very few of them can do anything more than report. . . . Generally speaking, they write in a voiceless style . . . and it doesn't apply anymore."

As if that wasn't enough, then it gets really interesting -- Dvorak:

"Partisan writing is probably going to return to the fore where it was in the 1800s. . . . Papers would be on a side of an issue."

That sounds familiar.

Neha Tiwari comes to the conclusion she had a near miss, and was lucky to not get into graduate J-School. (Never would be able to pay off the $36K per year of student debt with a $40K a year job). Leo Laporte helps close off the discussion:

"You can get your chops in the actual environment . . . Isn't that how journalists use to learn."

This is where J-School needs to find new ways to be relevant.