As strikes and work stoppages led by faculty, graduate students, and other academic staff become increasingly frequent on college campuses across the United States, student journalists often find themselves at the forefront of unfolding events reporting, writing, and disseminating news to their audiences. 

Last month faculty unions at three public universities in Illinois went on strike. Union members were on the picket line at Governors State University  for five days, at Chicago State University for 10 days and at Eastern Illinois University for six days. Earlier in the year, faculty at University of Illinois Chicago went on strike for a week.

Covering campus unrest as student journalists, however, puts them in a unique situation.

The student journalists are students whose education is deeply impacted by campus strikes, but they are also journalists whose conduct and work are held up against professional standard of ethics. The duality of their position and the resulting conflict of interest make it almost impossible for student journalists to be detached observers who cover strike stories objectively and ethically.     

Recent academic studies reveal that there is growing support among Americans for journalists to become more involved with ongoing social issues in the form of engaged journalism or advocacy journalism, thus suggesting that the traditional sense of objectivity might become an obsolete concept. Hearing aspiring journalists who covered university faculty strikes in April recall how they navigated this ethical dilemma sheds light on this discussion and shows that despite shifts in public opinion, they still follow long-held values and practices of traditional journalism. 

Ashanti Thomas, assistant photo editor of The Daily Eastern News, clearly understood where her sense of dilemma stemmed from while she covered the six-day faculty strike at Eastern Illinois University. “I recognized many professors walking in the picket line,” she said, “These were the professors I took classes from. They mattered to me because they impacted my life.” 

For Madelyn Kidd, editor-in-chief of the paper, knowing the details of ongoing, unsuccessful negotiations between Eastern’s administration and the faculty union posed as a potential challenge. “I’ve covered the negotiation for the past year and knew more about what’s going on than other students did. I couldn’t help but having my own views on the strike,” she said.

Some student journalists worked as academic support staff on campus, making them directly involved with the strike. Brian Delk, head news editor of The Daily Targum at Rutgers University, works as a tutor at the campus writing center. “I was on strike and didn’t host tutoring sessions, so it was hard not to show solidarity with the union members.”

The imbalance in the amount of information and quotes that the administration and the faculty unions provided to student journalists and in the level of availability of each party to answer journalists’ questions were another source of potentially unbalanced stories. While the faculty unions were easily accessible to student journalists, both The Daily Eastern News and The Daily Targum journalists experienced lack of responses from the administration especially at the beginning of the strikes.      

Student Journalists Exhibit Unwavering Focus on Responsibility and Objectivity 

Even though student journalists formed their own views about campus strikes and strike participants, they said that it did not hinder them from producing the coverage with professional integrity. The most fundamental element in this process was a clear understanding of their role as student journalists. Both Uriel Isaacs, associate news editor of The Daily Targum, and Cam’ron Hardy, news editor of The Daily Eastern News, saw informing students as their priority. “There was a lot of confusion among students that we needed to clarify,” Isaacs said. Hardy also considered “helping students understand what’s going on” to be most important in his reporting.

Traditional journalistic values of fairness and objectivity served as philosophical backbones for student journalists who covered campus strikes at Eastern Illinois University and Rutgers University in April. They repeatedly brought up the concepts such as objectivity, accuracy, and bias when recalling their work during the strike. “I knew that I had to be neutral and get both sides,” Hardy said, “If I get partial (views), I would be violating the code of conduct as a journalist.” Arishita Gupta, news assignment editor of The Daily Targum, echoed this belief. “As a writer, I tried to bring people’s voice to the public front as objectively as I could,” she said. Rob Le Cates, photo editor at The Daily Eastern News, was also clear about having to put away his views. “I was there to record what’s going on,” he said.   

In addition to ensuring their stories include perspectives from all parties involved, student journalists took measures to remain ethical in their news gathering process. When a professor invited them to attend a student rally to support the strike, when strike organizers offered them to take buttons and pins, or when an interviewee articulated a point that they felt particularly sympathetic toward, student journalists recalled that they declined offers or withheld themselves from showing any agreement. Kidd said that when she observed the picket line, she even created “physical distance” between the line and herself to make sure that no one mistook her as a strike participant.    

Student journalists such as Kidd appeared to be adhering to lessons of objectivity and balanced reporting that they learned in class and student media outlets, according to faculty advisors. Tim Drachlis, faculty editorial advisor at The Daily Eastern News emphasized the importance of classes, newsroom culture, and leadership in shaping student journalists’ sense of ethics, echoing the findings of a survey of 214 college journalists published in the Journal of Media Ethics. “I never doubted that they won’t be able to separate their personal views from what they cover,” Joe Gisondi, director of the student publications at Eastern Illinois University, said. “These are the things that we instill in them all the time in classes and the newsroom.” 

Calls for Ethics Policies

In an editorial published by The Daily Targum journalists, student reporters called for establishing ethics guidelines. They believed that journalistic organizations must create clear ethics policies in order to “balance journalistic standards with the individual rights of journalists as citizens.” 

As more and more Americans take it to the street to redress their concerns on a variety of issues, journalists will cover protests and strikes more frequently. Naturally, journalists are likely to develop their own opinions because these issues undoubtedly affect their own lives. Thus, the distinction between their roles as citizens and as journalists will become a critical part of doing their jobs effectively while also defending their own personal interests. When they were put to a test in April, student journalists in Illinois and New Jersey strove to attain traditional journalistic values through their reporting. It is now for journalism educators and the industry to foster them to become more effective at it.    

Ensung Kim is a professor at Eastern Illinois University, where she teaches journalism. Her research areas include the impact of technology on the journalism industry and education.  

Journalism educators face growing demands as they prepare students for a 21st century media industry. Teaching future journalists no longer means just teaching journalistic values and skills such as writing, editing, and ethics. Producing entry-level journalists means helping students develop social media and audience engagement skills, web/multimedia skills, teamwork, and the ability to work under pressure and tight deadlines, according to a recent study analyzing job openings by the top 10 newspaper and broadcast journalism companies in the U.S.

These changed demands aren’t surprising when one considers how news production, dissemination and consumption have changed in the U.S. in the past 20 years. With the explosive growth of social media and mobile devices, the journalism industry has witnessed unprecedented changes in the ways people engage with news: Roughly one third of adults in the U.S. reported that they went online for news in 2010, but by 2015, 63 percent of Twitter and Facebook users called each platform a source for news. In 2018, social media sites such as Facebook surpassed print newspapers as a primary news source for Americans.

The journalism industry has responded to these changes in a big hurry. Although news organizations initially focused on merely establishing a social media presence, news outlets have quickly moved to using social media tools in gathering and disseminating news, engaging with audiences, and developing revenue sources. Journalists themselves have evolved along with this trend. The traditional division of journalists’ specialties is long gone; today, an individual journalist takes and edits photos, records audio, and produces videos in addition to reporting and writing news stories. They use metrics to monitor audience responses, and follow social media to spot newsworthy trends.      

In this dynamic, some of the leading innovation educators have chimed in to share their experiences with integrating innovation into journalism curricula.

Innovation is more than embracing technology

To many, innovation is often technology-driven. For journalism educators, however, innovation involves much more than embracing latest technological development. Sally Renaud, who served as chair of the journalism department at Eastern Illinois University until 2018, said one has to look at the “big picture” in order to better understand innovation in journalism. She believes that journalists already know how to report news and tell stories, but the bigger question is whether it can it be paid for. “News organizations,” she said, “have always been searching for ways to ensure journalism can be financially sustainable.”

Aleszu Bajak, who manages Northeastern University’s Journalism Innovation and Media Advocacy graduate program, agreed that innovation is not just following technology itself. “Innovation is young journalists’ mindset to stay open, curious, and looking outwards,” he said, adding that one should look “beyond the walls of journalism for inspiration on the methods and formats to tell stories.”

Mark Berkey-Gerard, chair of the journalism department at Rowan University, emphasized that innovation is continuous. “Innovation is not a place you get to,” he said. “You’re continually looking for new ways to get information and stories that the public wants and needs and constantly looking for the best and the most impactful way to deliver stories to them in a meaningful way.” In that sense, innovation is philosophical. Nathan Carpenter, director of Convergence Media at Illinois State University, put it this way: “Innovation involves changing relationship between journalism, institution, and society as a whole.”

Innovation in journalism programs takes a couple of forms: technology-based and content-based. At one level, most—if not all—journalism programs have developed and implemented courses designed to help students acquire technological competency. Requiring all journalism majors to take a multimedia journalism course is quite common in many programs. An increasing number of journalism programs is offering courses such as data journalism, data visualization, analytics, metrics, video production, audience engagement, coding and web development with significant focus on cutting-edge technology. Some programs are making efforts, although still at a very early stage, to incorporate even artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality, or augmented reality into journalism curricula.  

At another level, journalism programs are trying to teach students innovative ways to think about what kinds of stories they would tell their audience. Holly Wise, a professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University, called her course teaching solutions journalism an innovation of content rather than technology. “It’s teaching students how to practice a new form of news gathering and framing of the content,” she said.

How are Journalism programs embracing innovation?

Journalism programs today clearly recognize the need for change. While journalism educators have long discussed convergence, multimedia journalism, and entrepreneurial journalism, today, their curricular discussions are dominated by social media, analytics, AI, and virtual (or augmented) reality. “Although shift comes slowly in academia, I feel that it passed the tipping point,” Berkey-Gerard said, “Everyone has come to grips with the change and are trying to figure out how to adapt faster and innovate faster.”

Educators are also contemplating how to ensure that journalism innovation is not solely focused on technological advances. Nathan Carpenter, director of Convergent Media at Illinois State University, said a concerted effort is being made to develop curricula that helps students identify disinformation. “We try to teach students better report trends and issues on social media,” he said. “Students don’t always know when and why a trend on social media matters.” At Eastern Illinois University, journalism and non-journalism students are learning how to discern truth from rumors in courses like News, Information and Media Literacy and Truth, Lies and Social Media.

While all journalism programs recognize the need for innovation, some schools are progressing faster than others. A study based on interviews with 70 deans and directors of journalism programs in public and private universities in the U.S. reported “some significant gaps in efforts to innovate… including a reactive mid-set and general lack of strategic approaches to innovating.” Those interviewed for this report frequently shared this view as well. “As a whole, they are not keeping up with the shift,” Bajak said. He argued that journalism programs are not producing students with enough skills for positions above entry level, such as assistant or associate editor positions.  He feels that many graduates are not ready for what job descriptions are demanding. 

How students are coping with innovation

Journalism educators said that they have observed three tendencies in students’ responses to innovation. First, students are invariably excited about innovation in journalism, but their competency varies greatly. They’re interested in learning social media, mobile journalism, and creating multimedia, multi-platform packages. While many students seem to be familiar with web development, a large number of students has a hard time thinking numerically for topics like data journalism. Journalism educators, Bajak suggested, should help students determine where they best fit into increasingly diverse job positions.

Second, while students are experts at using social media for personal uses, they aren’t really thinking about using social media journalistically. Educators found that approaching social media legally, ethically, and professionally is not something that students do naturally. “When students produce media products, they are in independent or personal production modes. They are not so much journalists, but (they are) personality driven like YouTubers or TikTok celebrities. They aren’t coming from (a) citizen journalism point of view,” Carpenter said.

Finally, many students still approach journalism in a traditional way. Wise said that innovation in journalism is a “paradigm shift” for students, as many students still associate journalism with writing. Berkey-Gerard noticed the same from his students: “Students tend to imitate what they perceive as the way news is done,” he said. “The first instinct is to replicate a traditional newspaper, because that’s what they can see and what they can imitate. When I say ‘Let’s rethink the student newspaper,’ that’s really scary for them.”

 Challenges and strategies for innovation

As is true with most innovations, integrating journalism innovation into curricula is challenging. Journalism educators face both individual and institutional obstacles that include personnel issues, administrative hurdles, and technological difficulties.

Almost all interviewees for this article called the slow pace of academia the number one challenge for incorporating innovation into journalism curriculum. Technology is changing faster than ever, but things move slowly in academia. “This is not an issue for some institutions. Across the board, they all have this issue, and it hinders the ability for schools to navigate and teach courses,” Wise said. It also takes time to obtain faculty buy-in. There are always those who resist change, and many changes occur in the time it takes to get faculty members on board with a new idea or technology. Another complication is mismatching personnel. It’s difficult to find faculty who have industry experience to teach the latest technologies while possessing a strong academic background at the same time.

In addition to structural issues, journalism innovation poses technological challenges. Carpenter explained: “First of all, trying to maintain software that lets you do social media listening has become unaffordable. Second, social media platforms are increasingly holding back academics’, researchers’, and general public’s access. And, third, keeping up with all of this takes constant effort to learn new things. Coding and programing, (an) ability to collect data, etc.“ 

In the face of these challenges, journalism educators continue to search for solutions and strategies to integrate innovation into curriculum. Berkey-Gerard said individual faculty members should surround themselves with other professors who already work on implementing innovation to come up with ideas and strategies. Whether the interaction is online or through conferences, being a part of a community of people who’re trying to do the same thing is “inspirational,” he said. Wise advised that individual faculty members should innovate their curriculum “even if it is just one unit, one module, or one learning objective.”

These educators called for budget and funding at the department, college, and university level. Attending conferences to stay up-to-date, bringing professionals to train faculty on new technologies, and rewarding excellence among students and faculty are all necessary elements to bring innovation to journalism programs. “We’ve got to find ways to reward faculty and students,” Berkey-Gerard said. “It can’t be just extra work.”    

Ensung Kim is an associate professor at Eastern Illinois University, where she teaches journalism. Her research areas include the impact of technology on the journalism industry and education.