What would Walter Williams do?
by Beverley Kreul, posted May 4, 2009
Journalism has changed drastically in the past century, and most of that change has occured in the past 10 years. From the weekly or daily news cycle used by local newspapers for decades, it has moved to a 24/7, never-ending stream of Internet news and blogs altering the jobs of journalists and the way readers receive their news.
If he were alive today, Walter Williams, founder of the Missouri School of Journalism, might wonder what effect this new technology is having on the profession.
“Careerism has replaced the craft,” said L. Francis Pike, in a video dedicated to the late Walter Williams. Pike watched the changes from a front-row seat at the Columbia Daily Tribune, where he worked for 70 years before finally retiring as circulation manager.
Dean Mills, dean of the Missouri School of Journalism, and Richard Farrer, author of “A Creed for My Profession” the biography of Walter Williams, met April 1, 2009, at the Reynolds Journalism Institute to have a conversation about these changes. The discussion was moderated by Mike Fancher, Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow.
Farrer claimed that the track journalism is headed in today’s society is doing well. He stated that smaller newspapers, those with less than 100,000 subscribers, have only lost two percent of their audience.
Farrer said that the problem is that society doesn’t trust what it reads.
Echoing those sentiments, Mills said, “Each day I wake up and say ‘Please don’t screw it up today.”
Mills believes that good journalism has changed since the time of Walter Williams, but that the founder of the first school of journalism in the U.S. would embrace new technologies and the different approaches to journalism.
“If we do our jobs right, then all the problems in journalism will fix themselves,” said Mills.
