A Century of Journalism Education
-first published in RTNDA Communicator on September 14, 2008
I’m going to begin this piece by breaking a cardinal rule—I’m writing about something to which I am very close. But I’ll put my disclaimers up front. My association with the Missouri School of Journalism goes back more than 30 years. I began as a student, became an alumnus, and ended up a part of the faculty. Over all those years, it became easy to take the school for granted. But at this celebration of 100 years of educating students in the art and science of journalism, I have time to look back and see just what it is the school has accomplished.
I have to begin with the most frequent question I get about the school: who are your famous graduates? It’s easy to list off ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas, CBS’s Russ Mitchell, PBS’s Jim Lehrer, ESPN’s John Anderson and many more. But the “celebrity” question fails to discover the real value of the Missouri School of Journalism. Yes, there are dozens of Missouri alumni working on-air and behind the scenes at the network level. But there are literally thousands more working as news directors, anchors, reporters, producers, photographers, and more at local television and radio stations across the country. In fact, I bet most of you reading this work with a Mizzou graduate, even if you aren’t aware of it. And those former students carry with them the legacy of the founder of the school and his vision for how modern, commercial journalism should serve the public.
Walter Williams founded the school on September 14, 1908 to educate journalists as members of a profession. His was the first attempt to provide a university-based education to journalists. Now, it’s hard to imagine hiring someone into your newsroom without a college degree. But Williams’ vision for a workforce of professionally-trained, college-educated journalists was revolutionary in its time. And to make that vision a reality, he began a teaching method that persists to this day—putting journalism students into working, commercial newsrooms to act as laboratories that demand as much as future jobs will. The Missouri Method still works today because it puts the most importance on the same values all of you share in your newsrooms—the ability to do the job professionally, ethically, and honestly.
RTNDA members join this association because it allows each and every one of us to support the professional quality of journalism Williams held so dear. Personally, I know the values I first learned in my real-world laboratories at the school so many years ago remain consistent reinforcement to the mission of RTNDA to be a leader in fighting for the rights of journalists to practice their profession unfettered by government interference and striving for the best practices with which we can serve our audiences. Williams died 11 years before RTNDA was founded. But I know he would have seen the association as the next step in continuing to educate and maintain this profession of journalism.
William wrote the Journalist’s Creed a couple of years before the founding of the school. It’s 303 words concisely—after all, Williams was a good editor—sum up the ideal journalists can work to achieve. And the final phrase seems to echo on now 100 years after the founding of the world’s first school of journalism, reminding us that ours is “a journalism of humanity, of and for today's world.” That is ultimately the focus when considering the impact of the Missouri School of Journalism. It has never been about our school’s celebrity graduates. It has always been about a service to humanity—in 1908, in 2008, and in the centuries to come.