The Personnel Committee of the Associated Press Managing Editors' Association interviewed 30 top journalism students who graduated from two dozen colleges and universities and who were working in newsrooms across the country. These graduates were interviewed in the past five years, and then their immediate supervisors were interviewed.
Here are some of the comments of several of those interviewed. Presume you are writing a Sunday feature for your newspaper. Your editor tells you that the school of journalism at the local state university is reassessing its curriculum and that this study might be newsworthy. She tells you not to bother about localizing the story but to go ahead and just write what the APME has found. (For the purposes of this exercise, presume that the study was published last week in the APME News.)
Reporters
A police reporter: "I remember my first assignment, a spot news story. I didn't know what to ask. The city editor had me on the phone and asked the questions, and I acted as a conduit."
Another young graduate: "I didn't learn the actual mechanics of gathering the news. I was equipped to be a rewrite man. The first couple of years after graduation were spent in learning where to look for news and how to harvest it."
Another former student: "The solution would be to gear the courses so that the student would gain practical experience in all types of writing—interviewing techniques, makeup and news judgment and photo assessment—by actually performing these in a simulated professional setting."
Another student: "Lack of knowledge about courts and government. I never entered a courtroom, and I never even had to look at a complaint."
Another student: "If I hadn't spent two summers on this newspaper I wouldn't have had any idea how newspapers operated, the physical limitations. Why didn't j-school teach us a little about what you can and cannot do—economically, politically, philosophically—under some managements?"
Another student: "Thanks to the tough professor who taught us never to take statements, quotes or statistics at face value. This was more useful than the constant stress on style and mechanics that some professors value almost to the exclusion of training on finding information."
Another student: "College gave me an exposure to city problems, both inside and outside the classroom. The curriculum put me on the street on a beat where I wrote about these problems."
Summaries of other comments: Good preparation on ethics and philosophy, but inadequate on techniques of journalism. Lack of deadline pressure. Inadequate training in reporting. Lack of knowledge of beats: courts, government, economics. Inadequate knowledge of what newspapers do in their coverage.
Many students praised the professor who "demanded rewriting, who criticized and criticized—in short who developed the love-hate relationship a reporter gets with his first city editor, if she's good," the APME News reports.
Editors
An editor: "The reporter brought an inquisitiveness and a social awareness above and beyond what a lot of editors had. But at first, he lacked a sense of perspective. There were no gray areas, all was black and white."
Another editor: "Beginning staffers often have problems with reporting skills and ease of expression. One would expect j-programs to impart these. Often they don't. I mean the ability to gather information, deal with people, spot the gaps in the things sources tell you. I mean an ability to organize and write in a lucid, concrete, structured and interesting way."
Many of the editors criticized the neophytes for poor organization of stories. One said a reporter wrote a term paper instead of a depth story. "The one weakness common to all is what I would call 'street sense.' How to develop their own news contacts; where various public buildings are; how to research a story; investigative techniques; and how to interview on a professional, penetrating level. At least one such course would give students a running start at developing street sense."
