New schools for new times
By Byron Scott and Anya Litvak Posted Apr 1 2006
Karen Steinbruek
An old building is the new home to the Independent Journalism Center in Chisinau, Moldova
From small nations such as Moldova or Mozambique to the very largest and expanding economies of India and China, a new wave of journalism schools is developing worldwide. Local and vocal, these 21st century births, while mindful of the precedent set by the media-training centers launched immediately after the fall of the Soviet bloc, emphasize indigenous journalism education. Where the journalistic missionaries of the last decade worked to import a foreign standard for the press, the current tide aims to carve out its own.
Although benefiting from the lessons learned by journalism schools and centers founded in the heady Western evangelism that followed the fall of the Soviet Union — some of which still survive —the new schools tend to be more practical, concerned both with method and maintenance. Some are tied consciously to the goals of spreading democracy and free expression.
Others prefer to identify with international development and commercial globalization.
The same open-handed donors of the 1990s, including private business, Open Society (Soros), Press Now, National Endowment for Democracy, European Union and the U.S. Department of State – now want to see multi-year plans for sustainability beyond the startup zeal. It now takes a bit longer for new journalism schools to launch.
For Corina Cepoi, director of the graduate-level school that plans to open in April at Moldova’s Independent Journalism Center, the process took over seven years. In common with similar centers throughout Eastern Europe, the Chisinau center has concentrated on short-term workshops over the past decade. Cepoi made a needs assessment and preliminary plan as part of her Master’s project as a Muskie Fellow at the Missouri School of Journalism. After her return to Moldova she used the work to attract a “training-the-trainers” grant from the U.S. Department of State.
The funding provided for a three-year “Moldova-Missouri shuttle,” says Cepoi. Potential faculty spent weeks or months studying pedagogical technique in Missouri while that school’s faculty taught frequent workshops in Chisinau.
“We believe it is very important to develop and work with our own trainers, at least in the fields we have them,” says Cepoi. “It will facilitate our transition to a self-sufficient organization that will depend less on donors and external funding.”
The exchange also fosters dialogue about what methods are useful for Moldova and how Moldovan journalists can appropriate them. “Local trainers are gaining confidence and they gain more experience being trained as trainers,” Cepoi says. The one-year program, including student journalists from Transdneister, will be taught primarily in Romanian, though English will be offered to facilitate Internet research.
Starting in 2001, the University of North Texas used a “fast-track” journalism degree program to train native faculty for the 2004 founding of the College of Communication and the Arts at Mozambique’s Eduardo Mondlane University. “We provided scholarships and training for three of the current faculty members,” says Mitch Land, graduate dean of the journalism school in Denton, Texas. “Two additional students in the fast-track program are still here. One is working on his doctorate while the other is working in an internship.” “Teaching-the-teachers” workshops were also held in Mozambique by UNT faculty. James Mueller, assistant professor at the university and a trainer with the Mozambique project, immediately saw why his students would make better teachers, given the tools and techniques.
“Those journalists have already covered the types of stories American reporters rarely see,” Mueller wrote in a description of his experiences. “During the chaos of the civil war, one of my students who worked in television made the agonizing decision to run video of a dog chewing a half-eaten baby’s corpse it had stolen from the city morgue. The broadcaster said people needed to be educated about what was happening in their country.” With such disparate realities, examples in American texts are frequently puzzling or irrelevant in transitional societies like Mozambique.
Similar tactics were used in 2002 to create faculty for new graduate journalism programs at Pristina University in Kosovo and the Caucasus Media Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia. Taught entirely by Kosovars, the two-year program is in cooperation with Cardiff University and the United Kingdom’s Thomson Foundation. Key Tbilisi faculty earned graduate degrees in a special program at Louisiana State University.
In India, the world’s largest democracy, a new journalism school has sprung up under the direct sponsorship of the nation’s largest broadcast, film and entertainment company, B.A.G. The Indian School of Media and Entertainment Studies, located in Noida, near New Delhi, is a degree-granting institution that contrasts to the traditional, British-style university format by building heavy professional courses on top of theoretical general education. The school, which began in 2003, emphasizes high-tech and new-tech, along with a liberal arts core. It makes extensive use of online instruction, including from internationally based instructors.
“As proud Indians we wanted to contribute our might to making electronic journalism in India a vibrant and responsible part of the media,” says Subodh Lol, dean of faculties. “To achieve this, we needed not only to create standards but also ensure that the world of broadcast journalism will have a steady reinforcement in the form of competent and ethically strong young entrants… electronic media holds out promise of nearly 2 million jobs in the next three years.”
The University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, a late 20th century startup, is getting ready to admit its first Master’s-level class. A major impetus, says Professor Yuen Ying Chan, center director, is to develop future Chinese faculty with the right mix of academic and professional credentials and “home-grown experience.”
The roster of planned and expanding schools in a variety of nations –Bahrain and Qatar in the Persian Gulf, the transitional nations of Central Asia and elsewhere – all seem to share common needs and goals.
Yes, send us your expatriate journalists from the U.S. and Western Europe, but let them bring along a plan to turn things over to us, ASAP. Then we'll keep in touch on the internet.
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Comparing the schools
While no two of the newest journalism programs had the same startup plan, they do have several commn characteristics:
• A preference for developing their own faculty, although usually with international advice and support from American or European partners.
• Developing their own curricula and materials instead of cut-and-paste use of Western texts, tests and degree requirements.
• A preference for hands-on, practical training over the theoretical approaches of older existing universities in the same nation.
• Postgraduate or Master’s training with active plans for doctoral programs.
• The tools of the Internet and World Wide Web are central to it all.