Newspapers are to Journalism as Schools are to _____

I've been thinking about posting something regarding the collapse of newspapers for a while. The Rocky Mountain News goes under, the Strib declares bankruptcy (and who would have thought 18 months ago that the PiPress might actually wind up in a stronger position that the Strib?) and now the Seattle Post-Intelligencer goes web-only. Meanwhile online, MinnPost seems to have all the best writers that the Strib fired. I'm not entirely sure what I was going to say . . . something about this fascinating intersection between technology and economics and social good, no doubt. Whatever I would have written would have been pathetically un-insightful compared to Clay Shirky's BRILLIANT essay on the subject.

Shirky steps back far enough to understand that what is going on in newspapers today is not about recessions or advertising or even news. It's about the technological revolution through which we are living.

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

Not only is the piece fascinating for its economic and historic insights, but it also struck me as a viable analysis of not just newspapers and journalism, but schools and education as well.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

Is that not true of what public education faces today as well? Would we not value from a conversation focused not on 'improving our schools' but on 'educating our children'? Shouldn't we be 'doing whatever works' rather than 'preserving the institutions' that are failing?

Like newspapers, the current economic model of public education has come undone and most of us involved in educational reform are spinning our wheels, trying to 'fix' something that, at least as it is currently delivered and conceived, may not be fixable.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that public education is beyond the pale or that we can't successfully educate children. Shirky makes a critical distinction between journalism (a vitally important social good) and newspapers (one particular economic model for delivering said social good that worked for a while but is now irreversibly failing). Likewise, perhaps we should be distinguishing between the social good we want (a meaningful education for all children) and our current delivery model for that social good (schools whose fundamental structure and processes have not altered in over 50 years).

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses

Are we in education, not doing exactly this? Searching for a facelift through curriculum or teacher preparation or merit pay or [insert your favorite reform-du-jour here] to save our old forms of organization (schools, tenure, grade-levels, six-hour school days, 9 month school years).

I certainly don't have a fully baked idea of what the alternative to these structures looks like. (Sharky would argue no one does in a revolution of this sort.) But I worry that if we continue to spend our energies focused on the structures and organizations that are failing us we risk losing not just our public schools, but our commitment and society's investment in public education. Just as newspaper subscriptions slowly trickled away from publishers, so too are families (particularly in our cities) finding alternatives to the rigid system we have in place.

Newspaper editors are well-intentioned, intelligent people fighting hard to preserve the invaluable service they provide our society. Let us hope that educational leaders and reformers learn from their experience.

Society doesn’t need newspapers schools. What we need is journalism education. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism education and to strengthen newspapers schools have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism education instead.