J-Schools to Focus on Ethics

By: Lucia Moses As editors respond to the Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg scandals by reviewing newsroom rules, some industry watchers are calling for deeper examination of newspaper leadership.

"It's as much a management problem as it is a problem of a bad employee," said John Lavine, director of Northwestern University's Media Management Center, which provides executive training programs.

The "Impact" study by the center's Readership Institute found newspapers suffered from an old-style military-like culture. The institute believes this top-down management style negatively impacts readership, but Lavine noted it also fosters communication failures by discouraging people from taking responsibility and making constructive change.

Managers can start by examining how well their organization's values are communicated, both verbally and through action. And it's not just a newsroom issue: Ethics need to be stressed throughout the organization, he said.

Anticipating more interest in self-improvement, journalism organizations are scrambling to create new ethics and leadership training programs.

The American Press Institute and American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) will invite top editors to a two-day ethics seminar later this month. And the Poynter Institute is planning a series of one-day ethics workshops around the country next year, designed to help news leaders become better decision-makers.

ASNE also is looking at the state of ethics education in journalism schools to see if gaps in curricula exist.

Some J-school faculty members and deans said they've already increased emphasis on ethics in recent years, and that apart from adding Blair to their list of case studies, they're doing all they can to teach future journalists right from wrong.

"Honestly, we have not come up with anything," said Christopher Callahan, associate journalism dean at the University of Maryland, which Blair attended. The school a few years ago added a three-credit ethics course requirement and infuses ethics lessons in its other classes. "I'm open to suggestions," he added.

Kim Walsh-Childers, who teaches at the University of Florida's J-school, said that having had several students plagiarize assignments, she now hits on ethics in all her classes. "At one time, we would have assumed that any student who was serious about a journalism career would have understood why these types of behaviors are unacceptable," she wrote in an e-mail to E&P. "Now, I think, that seems more in doubt."

Cynthia Gorney, associate dean at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, said the current scandal "will be tremendously useful" to education programs. "I am champing at the bit to use this in the fall," she told CBS.MarketWatch.com.

It remains to be seen if the Blair affair becomes a tipping point for widespread reform. "The journalism business is not one of the strongest in the country when it comes to professional development," lamented Robert M. Steele, ethics group leader at Poynter.

Lavine claimed that since the Blair scandal hit, several news executives have called wondering if they have a management problem, or asking if they're making the right kinds of changes. Still, he noted, "Newspaper cultures are very slow to change."