Who Really Needs a Journalism Degree?

There are rumblings that journalism schools, as we have known them, are on the decline in America. It’s assumed that this is tied to the decline in job opportunities in newsrooms and magazines as those industries die an agonizingly slow and painful death.

In some corners the decline of the J-schools is being lamented almost as if it is the death of truth, itself. In other corners it’s applauded as a welcome change from the elitist persona journalists have taken on. Why do they even like to be called “Journalists” anyway? Doesn’t “Reporter” sound cooler, tougher?

Unlike the practice of law, medicine or teaching, journalism requires no license, no certificate and no college degree. Just like the actors who spend years getting their Master’s Degree in Theatre Arts and come to Hollywood to secure that great bartending job, J-school graduates enter the job market with enormous debt and high expectations. If they do get an entry-level position, I suspect they learn more about the actual business of journalism in their first month on the job than they did in their four years at college.

Where once these elite (and expensive) programs used to spend most of their time teaching about an ethereal code of journalistic ethics, they are now focusing on how to produce YouTube videos and how to blog. (I kid you not, kids are getting their parents to shell out $100K per year to learn how to blog.)

But, of course, the editors doing the hiring have their journalism degrees and for them to validate the wasted years they spent attaining that sheepskin, they require their new employees to have undergone the same penance. And so the J-School veil of legitimacy is propped up and legitimized for no good reason other than to make everyone in the newsroom feel superior to their blue-collar readers.

Are you worried about the decline of good journalists if J-Schools start to vanish? Take a look at arguably the most influential journalists in the last fifty years:

• Bob Woodward, English Literature Degree
• Edward R. Murrow, Speech Degree
• Walter Cronkite, No College Degree
• Carl Bernstein, No College Degree

And, which of their contemporaries did get a journalism degree? This guy:

Disgraced Dan Rather.

What are they teaching in those J-schools?