By Emphasizing “Entrepreneurship,” J-Schools Are Reinforcing Precarity

The media world is collapsing. Time to get into massive debt!

By Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein

The journalism industry keeps crumbling. Almost 1,800 local papers do not exist anymore, and the newsroom workforce declined by 23 percent between 2008 and 2017. That makes the idea of journalism school both more attractive and riskier: inexperienced journalists want any leg up they can get so they can secure a job, but if that job never materializes, then you’re stuck in potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.

A new study, called “Professionalizing Contingency,” finds that journalism school professors are reacting to the precarity of the journalism industry with a cynical kind of repackaging. They’ve decided to sell the tumult as an exciting opportunity, suggesting that instead of fighting for a better system, students should simply expand their idea of what journalism is. Professors suggest that maybe journalism is starting a tech company, or, say, doing public relations. The study finds that journalism school professors said things like, “graduates should be prepared for and even enjoy the precarity of the labor market.”

In doing so, this new form of j-school invalidates the very reason that journalism schools were invented: to protect workers from the uncertainties of entering the job market and professionalize the field.

Julia Sklar, who graduated from Boston University’s program in Science Journalism, said that professors at her school were unflinchingly realistic about job prospects, suggesting that students might have to use their j-school skills in PR or communications instead of hard-news media.

“[Professors] told us from the get-go that proper journalism would be extremely hard to fight our way into… and that we shouldn’t feel shame in going down that route,” Sklar said.

The study, published in Social Forces, shows that the once rigid lines between journalist and press flack; editorial stylist and advertiser; or public servant and businessperson are being blurred by journalism schools and professors. This blurring comes with an emphasis on what they call “entrepreneurialism” — that is, starting your own journalism-adjacent business rather than hoping to get a job in the establishment.

The study, called “Professionalizing Contingency: How Journalism Schools Adapt to Deprofessionalization” was conducted by two researchers, professors Max Bebris of Rice University and Caitlin Petre of Rutgers. Based on 113 interviews with journalism school faculty from 44 universities that offered some kind of advanced degree in journalism, they find that instead of protecting students from the turbulence of the job market, journalism schools have thrown up their hands and began to encourage students to find work in highly precarious positions or elsewhere entirely.

Besbris and Petre also observed a number of in-person events and classes at journalism schools. One event was a panel at a prestigious Northeastern university advertised as a session on the “changing media landscape.” Strangely, the event began with an “alumni startup showcase” where graduates got up on stage and told everyone about the tech companies they had founded. One presenter had created an app that helped people log their workouts. Another created a site that “scours the news so you don’t have to.” A third told the crowd about a website they made that automated most of the clerical tasks in a doctor’s office, which he bragged had allowed his father to lay off three receptionists. The school wasn’t calling these endeavors journalism per se, but they implied that founding a technology business was a viable option for people with a graduate degree in journalism.

Professional degrees were created over a hundred years ago not only to further educate students who wanted to go into fields like law or medicine, but also to formalize specific professions. Schools offered credentialing, which was meant to limit the number of people who could practice a certain trade. This stabilized the job market, but also limited it to the privileged few who could afford graduate school.

But journalism is different than law or medicine: there is no accreditation or licensing to be obtained. Journalism school is thus more like an art or creative writing program; it gives you a way to think about a career but not necessarily the career itself.

Nonetheless, in 1904 Joseph Pulitzer envisioned endowing a professional school that would focus on the editorial side of journalism. He thought business interests were crass, and would not fit in with a professional curriculum. “Commercialism has a legitimate place in a newspaper, namely, in the business office,” he wrote. “But commercialism, which is proper and necessary in the business office, becomes a degradation and a danger when it invades the editorial rooms.”

Initially, universities weren’t interested in Pulitzer’s grand plan. But by 1920 journalism needed professionalization to define itself in opposition to new fields that were emerging: public relations and advertising. As Besbris and Petre note, at that time, “core professional values such as objectivity, accuracy, and editorial independence began to solidify.” Without this professionalization, there might be no meaningful distinction between advertising and journalism.

Today, in contrast, the authors of the study find that “journalism school professors are largely trying, not to reinforce the boundaries of journalism, but rather to blur or even demolish them entirely.”

Bebris and Petre think this blurring leads to “professionalizing contingency,” by which they mean professional preparation for a deprofessionalized, highly contingent labor market. In the study they describe it as “a process by which professional schools train students for lower-status jobs defined by precarity.” That’s what professors might be doing when they encourage j-school students to be “entrepreneurial.”

The study finds that professors use the word “entrepreneurial” in three distinct ways: to encourage students to start their own company or freelance full-time, to spend time branding themselves as a journalist, or to be endlessly game for the ups and downs of the freelance life.

The frequent use of the word “entrepreneurial” is telling. John Patrick Leary, a professor of English at Wayne State University and author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, explained to me that, “entrepreneurship, because of its basically vague meaning, can be conflated with a host of things…to lend an air of virtue and excitement. It can also be used opportunistically, to sell something that might go under another, less appealing name, like precarity or job insecurity.” That is, instructing students to be entrepreneurial is a way to sell the volatility of the journalism as fun and sexy, instead of a trend to organize and fight against.

However, of all the journalism school graduates I talked to, no one could explicitly point to an instance where they were encouraged to embrace precarious employment — countering the findings of the report. Maya Kaufman, a graduate of Columbia University’s program, said that professors “were pretty flexible, … I don’t think they were encouraging students to do any one sort of thing.” Also, graduates often mentioned feeling unprepared by graduate school for freelancing full-time. Sindy Nanclares, a recent graduate of the Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY, said she had to go after hours to discuss with professors about how to pitch stories, how to approach contracts, and how to present herself to editors.

Both Nanclares and Kaufman also indicated that in their programs there was a robust debate about what is and isn’t journalism. However, in Nanclares’ extra semester in CUNY’s entrepreneurial journalism advanced degree program, “playing and testing the lines was much more permissible than in the CUNY J-school program, for sure.”

When I spoke with Petre she suggested that what is lacking from journalism school curriculum is any discussion about the fight for newsroom unions, professional organizing that might protect workers, and any other kind of political or labor organizing. Something else that is missing is a broader liberal arts focus, which might be attributable to the high cost of school in general: students want immediately useful skills so they can begin to pay off their debt, instead of the abstract, deeper theory that may or may not help them in the long run.

As Besbris and Petre point out in their study, professional schools are supposed to be where the identity of a profession is formed. In this light, journalism schools have a choice: either continue to embrace the precarity of journalism and remain locked in a death spiral, or start thinking about a future for journalism that requires far less exploitation (or none at all!). Change in the landscape of media labor could begin at the university level, though it’s clear that it hasn’t yet.

Interestingly, no one I talked to who went to journalism school said they completely regretted it. They obtained valuable skills investigating, editing video, and quickly crafting prose. Many said they met people who helped them land internships and jobs. No one was fixated on abstract theory or research, if their programs contained any at all. This suggests that another, better option would be to just eliminate the professional journalism degrees and turn them into shorter technical training programs, or, better yet, actual internships.

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