Media (r)Evolution: Dr. William McKeen
Posted on 26. Oct, 2009 by Jessica Newman in Campus
William McKeen is a professor and chair of the Department of Journalism at the University of Florida in the College of Journalism and Communications. McKeen worked as a newspaper reporter and copy editor for many years and later moved into magazines. He then decided to go back to graduate school, after which he changed his career path and became a professor. He taught at Western Kentucky University and the University of Oklahoma before settling down at UF in 1986.
Jessica Newman: The first question I want to start out with centers around the perception of journalism and its future. You hear a lot of talk about the sinking ship of journalism, the death of newspapers and traditional journalism as we know it. What’s your opinion on that?
William McKeen: Well, first of all, I wouldn’t necessarily write off newspapers. I think newspapers might be repositioned for a different sort of audience, a different style of reader. The most interesting research I heard this summer was, whereas Gen-X has written off print and everything is on the web, the Millennials believe that since they have been vandalizing web sites since they were in single digits, they don’t have the respect for online information that Gen-X just seems to have a hard-on for. But I don’t see that we have to be an either/or culture. I think we should have more choices and more options. No matter how people get the information, people still need the information. The problem with somebody creating news alerts from Google and relying on those daily news alerts to give them the illusion of being well-informed is that they’re not well-informed. They’re only learning the news that they want. The journalist’s job has always been not only to report the news but to kind of look through the world and say this is the information that my readers need to know. Whether they want it or not, they need to know this, and then they can decide. If [the system we have now] changes, I think it’s going to be difficult to duplicate some of the really good things about traditional print journalism. What I worry about is that we’re losing that magical ability to think for ourselves. We allow machines to do it for us. I don’t think the function of journalism is going away. I think it’s going to become an evermore valuable need in society because we have too much information, as the great poet Sting once said. We have too much information, and more is less because with all this information, we’re in danger of people tuning it out or just selecting that information that makes them happy and reinforces their view of the world. The job of a journalist is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted. I have a lot of faith in the function of journalism. It’s just the way we receive information may change.
JN: The way we receive information has always been changing since the beginning of journalism. Is this shift any different?
WM: Something like a newspaper has been around since 59 B.C. For centuries, they were hand-copied. But there was this need for information. There was this feeling that information was currency, that this was a sign of a healthy, free, intelligent society. Certainly the introduction of printing to the Western world really changed things because it made mass communication possible. Fifteen years ago, there wasn’t an online newspaper, and now there is. I think our generation, the people here and now, are awfully arrogant to think that they’re going to kill off this system of free expression that we’ve had for all these years. It may die; it may change; it may morph. First there were newspapers and then newsreels and then radio and then TV. Now there’s the web. All we’ve seen is a multiplicity of choices.
JN: So what does this all mean for journalism schools? Is there going to have to be a drastic change in our curriculum?
WM: I think we need to teach people more tools or at least tell them that they need to learn them. I really resist taking our curriculum and turning it into teaching software. The analogy I always make is we just assumed people could type. We never taught them to type. If some type faster than the others, it didn’t matter as long as they made deadline. So I think we can presume a significant amount of technical knowledge of students when they come in. Our focus should be on social responsibility, ethics, on gathering information, analyzing information, then further reporting through talking to people and then storytelling.
JN: You never really had to go to school to be a journalist, but now anybody can do it. Are we obsolete now?
WM: There is no license to be a journalist. You don’t have to be a journalism major. Now, that being said, a lot of the people who come here to hire, they say, “Well, I was a history or an English major.” And I sort of chide them, and I say, “Well, are you going to the history department or the English department to recruit?” They’re not because there is no card identifying you as a journalist. We’re sort of an entry to the profession. We serve that function. Some of the greatest journalists I know didn’t even go to college, much less get a degree in journalism. Then there are a lot of people that somehow graduate from this program, and I wouldn’t trust them to open a jar of peanut butter. Sometimes I think, how do you dress yourself in the morning? It’s not the natural, child-like curiosity that you want. It’s just a profound ignorance. I always tell people there is a great difference between schooling and education because schooling is the stuff you enroll in and it’s what you pay money for. But education is really what you do for yourself. What is the question they always ask? “Do I need to know this? What do you want from me?” I am asshole because I always answer, “You need to know everything.” And you do. You need to know everything. Life is short; you need to know as much as you can possibly know.
JN: What does this mean for alternative media?
WM: The journalist I revere most, wouldn’t always agree with him, was I.F. Stone. Of course, everyone admires him because he’s like a totem. He’s like a face on Mt. Rushmore. But the thing I like most about him is that he had an independent voice. He had a small newspaper produced in the basement of his home. The circulation office was the dining room table. He used to mail out his newspaper from the corner box in his little neighborhood. Yet people shook when they read what he wrote. Here is a guy that, in your lifetime, walked the earth, and this is what he did. In a way, it’s kind of like a fairy tale. But I think the greatest thing about the Internet is that it has kind of removed that economic impediment. I think that starting a competing newspaper, as A.J. Leibling said, it doesn’t necessarily mean there will be better journalism, but it sure makes it more possible. What I was getting to earlier is that the best thing about the Internet is that it has removed that economic impediment. With a web site, you can have an effect. Not to go all religious on your ass, but I do think it takes somebody with that kind of almost missionary zeal to be a journalist. If someone makes the commitment and has the desire to be a journalist, then that’s somebody to be treasured. I really do believe that that’s the best thing about the Internet. People who think I’m anti-technology can go fuck themselves because I really do think it almost makes it possible to have the really vigorous and exciting stuff that we had in the colonial era. Back then, as long as you had a printing press, you could do it by yourself. You can do that again. The New York Times web site versus Fred’s web site, there is almost an equal playing field. There’s the possibility there. That’s the exciting thing about it.
