innovation.

I’ve had a great time in the FIG this year. I love the Walter Williams program – the mentorship with the faculty is an amazing opportunity to really connect with a professor and get to know the industry from a different perspective. The networking opportunities and chance to meet professionals at things like the Honors Medal Banquet have been both fun and extremely interesting. However, I don’t understand what makes us stand apart, and I don’t understand what literally makes us stand apart in terms of our living quarters. Journalists aren’t journalists based on how well they do on a multiple-choice math section – they’re journalists based on how well they write.

It seems unfair and almost inappropriate, given our profession, that we are set apart based on how many questions we get right on a test we take our junior year of high school. It seems that a better means to structure or select for a high-honors journalism FIG or learning community (which I fully support the concept of) would be to have applicants submit a writing portfolio for faculty to look over. That’s how you get the job in the industry, and if Missouri’s journalism program is about the hands-on method that it so strongly promotes, then it should make every effort to incorporate this into every aspect of their program.

Also, submitting the portfolio would ensure that those who were truly interested in journalism, and dedicated to it as a career path, would be extended the mentorship and networking opportunities that are hugely beneficial to a fledgling journalist. College is a great time to try new things and figure out what one wants to do (I discovered a love for anthropology this semester), but it seems most logical that those kids who are most set on journalism be the ones who are extended those special opportunities. While some of us on the seventh floor may be wavering in our choice of careers, there are those on the fifth and sixth floors who are committed to journalism and would love to be able to have the opportunities we have, but simply didn’t answer enough math questions right to merit a mentorship.

Which brings me to my second and final suggestion: incorporate and desegregate the floors. Our nickname for the “Penthouse” floor is no accident – to some extent, we seem to consider ourselves elite due to our FIG placement and our segregation into “us” on the seventh floor and the “others” on the next two below us. Facebook notes have been written to this extent, and whether it’s a joke or not, in every joke there’s a little truth. I don’t see the necessity for this segregation – it simply makes the journalism kids divided, rather than unified and able to collaborate. This greatly diminishes the sense of community (though it reaffirms it on our floor, but our floor alone), isolates the Honors Journalism kids (I’ve had several tell me that they hate coming up to the seventh floor because of the attitude they perceive from us), and negates possible opportunities for the collaboration that’s essential to making us better writers and journalists. By isolating the “smart” kids, it really does present an elitist image, one that we are not all-to-willing to take somewhat to heart, but one that distances others.

This seems even more unnecessary when one ventures outside of Mark Twain into a newsroom, since those boundaries disappear when one actually does journalism. Newsrooms are a great equalizer – at the Maneater, no one gets preference on a story because they’re in Walter Williams. People don’t even ask, simply because they don’t care. And they shouldn’t – what makes one successful is how well they write. An editor wouldn’t give a reporter a more important story simply because they were Walter Williams. In fact, when I started there, I had someone tell me “You’re one of the most normal Walter Williams kids…you’re not stuck up.” Is that the kind of image we really want to be presenting? In the newsroom, just as in the real world, who cares? It’s how well you write and who you know.

If the divide between being Walter Williams and “just” Honors doesn’t exist beyond Mark Twain, why do we create a barrier that divides instead of unifies?

These things I call on the coordinators of the program to consider in coming years, because while tradition is strong, sometimes innovation and change can be better – just what the field of journalism is learning now.

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~ by kea279 on December 16, 2009.