FIX THIS HOLE
I WAS in Year 10 when my careers teacher at Edenhope High School told me I should give up any hope of becoming a journalist.
“Why not become a teacher?” he said.
He had a little library of careers booklets designed to help me pick the right career.
The booklet for “Journalist” didn’t put me off, even though cadetships were few and far between and the barrier to entry was high.
It was all rubbish, written by people who thought that every journalist that ever lived needed to find their first job at a metropolitan daily newspaper, such as The Sun or The Australian.
I’d never seen the insides of the local newspaper or met the editor.
Actually, I’d never seen a copy of it.
I commuted 90 minutes a day to get to school from a hamlet of a dozen houses where work experience didn’t even exist as a fantasy.
No one connected me to a relevant local person.
The education system was aimed, even then, at filling university placements.
So, I went to university and started a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in journalism at Deakin University.
In that very first intake, we spent a lot of time theorising about media power, mass communications and deeply existential concepts such as media bias.
We wrote a bunch of news stories, but not many.
Maybe I penned a dozen real ones over the lifetime of the course.
That’s about the same as one journalist does in a week at a local newspaper.
The copy kids who skipped uni and snared a cadetship would have written 2000 stories by the time I left the classroom.
Who do you think crafted a better yarn by that point: the cub reporter with 2000 stories under their belt or the graduate with a folio of 12?
Australian journalism and media courses have since become a hefty cash cow for universities which churn thousands of graduates out every year for even fewer placements.
They’re spending millions on professional TV studios, covering new media technologies, such as podcasting, social media and even augmented reality.
In many respects, the technical skills of today’s university graduate are superior to what a cadet journalist might learn on the job.
But the emphasis on mastering platforms and technologies — both on the job and in universities — has come at the expense of mastering newsgathering and storytelling in a data-driven society.
We’ve touched on this before, how we live in the age of the algorithm where the decisions that affect our lives are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models.
And we’ve said that for journalism to survive and be trusted, then journalists must be able to question the data for themselves and not rely on the analysis of others.
This requires a new type of journalist and a new type of journalism, a combination of two disciplines — data science and storytelling.
In my experience, journalists are pretty good at telling stories but struggle with numbers while data scientists prefer to interview a spreadsheet than spend time talking to real people.
At university, these two disciplines sit in different schools, even different buildings.
Students in both want to tell stories about the world we live in.
And we, in the news business, want our newsrooms to be equipped with journalists who can question the information decisions that make that world tick.
Unlike the good old days, we can’t train these journalists ourselves, because we don’t have the skills.
And, in a bizarre Catch-22, our lumbering universities have yet to prioritise data science and statistics within their journalism courses, even as a specialisation.
Those that do (and there are some efforts) are dipping their toes, rather than doubling down on it.
If trust is the currency of the future, then this nexus — where data meets humanity — must be core to the competencies trained in our institutions.