In Response to a Fellow Journalism Adjunct Complaining That His Student Asked Him What News Stories He Should Read Up On to Pass Columbia’s J-School Entrance Test
This episode points to me to a larger issue I’ve noticed my students struggling with — or, rather, that I struggle with on my students’ behalf, as they seem blithely unconcerned about it: My students don’t have the urgent desire to know things before other people — or at least coincident with other people — that drove so many of us into journalism in the first place.
I don’t know if they’re too swamped with homework, or too attached to their phones, or just wrapped in a peer cocoon that supersedes any interest in the outside world, or what. But for example, not only do the students in my pop-culture journalism class not really read the Times, the Post, the New Yorker, or even the entertainment blogs I’ve asked them to stay up to date on; by a survey of hands last week, all but three of them had neither seen THE SOCIAL NETWORK nor listened to the Kanye West album, arguably the two biggest pop-culture stories of the semester, and ones we’ve talked about at great length in class. (And also they’re really good for God’s sake!)
When I was a college kid I was ravenous for experience, or at least to seem experienced, and so there is no way I would have not seen that movie the weekend it came out, and listened to that album as soon as I could afford it. (And that was when albums were free.) Barring that, if asked in public whether I had done so, I *certainly* would have lied and said yes.
Anyways, These Kids Today, I Tell You.
