“Parenting” of journalists
Although there are more requirements from employers, today’s newsrooms are not exactly prepared to properly guide a person at the beginning of the journeybelieves Cristian Lupșa, journalist co-founder of DoR and teaching staff at FJSC, Faculty of Journalism of the University of Bucharest.
“Some have the expectation that they will be buzzing from day one. Many say that they can’t find good people because their expectation is that you come through the door and give them exactly what they asked for from the first task. But it doesn’t work that way”, explains Lupşa. On the one hand, it is a matter of resources. To mentor, you need time.
“Publishers say they have no people, no onboarding or mentoring processes to guide a young newcomer to a newsroom. There are few who really have time for that,” Lupșa says.
The expectations of today’s journalists have also changed in terms of the working environment. If before the journalists at the beginning of the journey went to the new job expecting a real “baptism”, (“you went to the newsroom wondering who will make fun of you today, who will take you to the shots”, as he says Lupsha), the current generation not only does not expect this approach, but is even outraged by this treatment.
It’s a change of mentality that we find in other fields as well and that will profoundly transform the work culture in the years to come.
“Newsrooms have to respond to these new expectations, but they’re not doing that much at the moment, unfortunately. I’ve heard many journalists say that young people should also learn by themselves, that’s what they did too. People already learn by doing, but there is too much pressure to do things at a certain level”, says Lupșa.
How much does journalism school help you to be a journalist?
One of the factors that significantly altered the way journalism is perceived is the revolutionizing of the act of informing. Today, it is no longer an exclusive role of the journalist. In this new information economy, where influencers, comedians or directly politicians become the preferred source of information, any young person who wants to enter the media can legitimately wonder if they need a journalism degree.
“I feel that I trained more as a journalist by working in newsrooms, but theory is also very important for a journalist, just like in all other jobs. You need to be theoretically prepared with principles in college to start the practical part”, says Emilia Șercan, investigative journalist at PressOne and professor at the Faculty of Journalism and Communication Sciences in Bucharest.
Theory remains, therefore, important, but the way in which the faculty chooses to teach its students should not be ignored either. At the Faculty of Journalism in Bucharest, many of the problems are about the same age as the institution, which, when it was founded, had nowhere to bring experienced journalists (the only “experts” available had worked almost exclusively in the communist press).
Cristian Lupșa, ex-DoR, attended the faculty’s courses between 1999 and 2003. He was also dissatisfied with the same problems that his own students there complain about today.
“I was doing almost nothing practical. They didn’t guide us enough, I never felt that the teachers were able to explain to me very concretely what it means to do journalism”, he says.
For him, things changed when he participated in a training program coordinated by the Center for Independent Journalism, where he learned practically what journalism is, thanks to some American journalists: “I made a newspaper in English about the University of Bucharest . Everything they taught us was parallel to the execution. I was doing news, reports, interviews. I was studying while also doing journalism. That was a revelation“, Lupșa remembers.
He followed a master’s degree in the USA, which, being also based on practice, confirmed to him that a different teaching model was also needed in Romanian journalism schools: “Do journalism and discuss what you’ve learned while doing it. But we we are far from creating a faculty that has journalistic practice as its core“.
Practice, the handicap of Romanian education
It’s a frustration that current students also feel, young people who are just starting out in this profession and from whom there is an expectation that they will make a better press, more “like outside”.
David Bularcaa journalist at HotNews and a third-year student at FJSC, feels that the mandatory 90 hours of practice is not enough: “Many colleagues went to practice at certain media trusts where expectations were high, but it was three weeks and they sat on a chair and no one noticed them.”
And if the student does nothing during the three years of undergraduate studies other than the mandatory internships, will leave the faculty benches clearly unpreparedthe young journalist thinks.
Andra Muresan, also a student at FJSC and journalist at Scena9, who just received a nomination at the Superscrieri Awards, wished she had written more during her college years: “I imagined that we would have courses or seminars where I would we work more on texts. I had the image in my head that I had formed after watching Gilmore Girls, because Rory was doing journalism at Yale.”
She also doesn’t think that the college experience is enough to train a student: “To some extent, it gives you some necessary tools and can give you a start, but it doesn’t prepare you for the reality of the media. I think that after three years you should know how to write a news story, a feature, maybe even an investigation. And I don’t think that’s happening.”
Even so, employers are looking for people who already know how to write, says Mureșan.
The faculty also had some reforms to better adapt to the present and prepare journalists for current challenges.
This is how the master’s degree in thematic journalism, coordinated by Emilia Șercan, was recently created, but even there things are difficult to change: “We wanted to replace one course with another much more adapted to what is happening in the current media landscape, and we encountered serious reluctance from colleagues, and their position was also supported by some students”, she says.
Șercan also notes the absence from the faculty of some subjects that would help journalists to form a solid general culture, that would help them better put the information in context: “A journalist must not only know the professional principles. They need to understand, for example, how things work economically or political systems. I have moments of embarrassment when I see colleagues who do not know some elementary things, of understanding things. This is due to gaps in their professional training”.
These gaps were also noticed by Cristian Lupșa: “You talk to third-year students and you notice that they also lack some basic skills of critical thinking or solving problems in general. But I don’t know how many things are related to journalism, how much more it is something related to the entire production line of Romanian education”.
“There are some journalists who speak without actually knowing what they are talking about. From mispronunciations, to misinterpretation of events. You see many people on TV born after mining, presenters who do not know the recent events of Romania, do not know the important people from the recent past or their political connections. They do not have a background for the information they provide”, Cătălin Striblea also confirms.
The other way: media schools of some trusts
In addition to state or private faculties, there have also appeared journalism schools affiliated to press trusts, such as Intact Media Academy (the media group to which stations such as Antena 1 and Antena 3 belong) or the Media School (of the RCS&RDS trust, which owns, among others, Digi24).
Given the problems listed so far, can such private schools be an alternative?
“I don’t think private schools can compete with state college. These schools are rather internships than a three-year cycle in which you learn journalism”, believes Clarice Dinu, from HotNews.
Many of those who go to such schools have already completed the Faculty of Journalism and saw these courses as an opportunity to open the door of a large newsroom, says Emilia Șercan: “People didn’t go there just to acquire a series of knowledge, but rather with the hope that they will be able to get a job at the end of the course in the very trust that held the courses”.
“It depends on what value I bring. I feel the need for some alternatives to the state faculty, because, unfortunately, I don’t see our journalism schools transforming any time soon”, adds Cristian Lupșa.
Yesterday’s moguls, today’s “moguls”.
The young journalists who enter the press today grew up and live in a completely different world compared to the beginnings of the free press in Romania. I don’t know what it means to be “rushed” by the time of printing, to page and suffer every line that does not fit in the newspaper. They no longer have tape recorders or equipment that breaks their backs or is so expensive that they can’t even get close to it.
A smartphone can be enough today. Add a laptop and you can call yourself a small media entrepreneur. You are your own mogul.
And the fact that no longer dependent on the means of production of media institutions gives them an important advantage to those who now enter the media, believes Cristian Lupșa.
“People who come into a newsroom are already content creators, whether it’s your personal Instagram account or your jokes with friends on Threads or even YouTube videos. They already come with some skills. The plus is the democratization of the way you can talk to the world, which is extraordinary,” he believes.
Although young journalists are more in tune with the current needs of readers, their generation does not trust the media and gets their information directly from social networks or influencers. The number of people who are actually willing to go to a website and read press articles is in continuous decline.
“In newsrooms where young people have gone, things are changing. We no longer just post on the website and wait for people to come there after a Facebook share. We also go on TikTok and Instagram with the information. And where can a newsroom learn how to package its information for TikTok, if not from a young journalist who uses TikTok?”, says David Bularca.
Even if changes are made, young journalists still feel the rigidity of newsrooms when it comes to posting content on social networks, believes Andra Mureșan: “I understand that it is also about the business model that forces you to bring the world to the site. Because TikTok and Instagram don’t bring you anything financially. You depend on the people who come to the site. And then naturally you no longer want to put resources elsewhere. In the long term, I think that money will also come from social networks, only that the financial pressures are quite high at the moment, it is difficult to look in that direction”.
Tags: journalism young wolf #90s
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