Reeducating the Educators p.

By: M.L. Stein

Reeducating the Educators p.
Editor warns that j-school students taught by
professors who have been away from newspapers for more
than five years may not be ready for today's job market
JOURNALISM STUDENTS WHOSE professors have been out of the news business for more than five years will not be ready for newspaper jobs, an editor has warned.
They also will have a hard time, she added, if their teachers "still crack jokes about USA Today as the McDonald's of newspapers with McNuggets of information and talk about the changes initiated by USA Today . . . as if they were the first bells tolling the death of journalism."
The warning came from Joan Behrmann, executive editor of the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, Calif., at a conference of the Region XI chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in Los Angeles.
To an audience that included a number of college students, Behrmann, one of USA Today's founding editors, stressed that technology will not be their problem, but being out of touch with sweeping changes in attracting readership may be.
"Anyone can sit down at a terminal, a leaf desk, a Macintosh or pagination station and learn it enough to be useful after some training," she said. "It's absolutely not brain surgery, and you should not get hung up on that. Just be open to learning it."
What has happened in editors' attitudes toward content is far more revolutionary than computerization, Behr-mann asserted.
"I'm talking about the revolution of a system where a group of editors?mostly white, straight and male?made the decisions on what would go into the next day's newspaper," she explained.
Those decision makers, the speaker said, looked inward, drawing their news perspective from "their own frame of the world," deciding what was important and controversial?and what belonged on Page One.
Sometimes there would be discussion in news conferences among "those dinosaurs of the business . . . but basically it was an inward-turned discussion," Behrmann recalled, adding: "You could call it by the same name as a popular TV show of the time: Father Knows Best."
A new approach is not universal, but it has taken place in hundreds of newsrooms across the country as newspapers began to realize that, while profits were still climbing, their readership was dwindling, the speaker said. Older readers were still loyal, but they were dying off, and the 18-to-34 segment of the population was not buying papers in sufficient numbers, she pointed out.
The trend for newspapers today is to turn outward, to ask readers about their interests and what they care about, Behrmann said.
Among the changes, Behrmann noted, are the different ways of packaging stories: creating easy points of entry for readers, fewer jumps, less jargon and more graphics.
All this is just the "tip of the iceberg," she said. "We are in the middle of a revolution in the news business and there is more change to come."
Besides having the traditional journalistic qualities ? a high-energy level, curiosity, a commitment to accuracy?young people entering newspapers must also have a "tolerance for change, because change is definitely in the air," Behrmann declared.