If my news writing classes over the last three semesters are any indication, fewer and fewer journalism students are reading newspapers or news magazines. This is not conjecture — ask the class and they will tell you (and have told me) that they get their news from social media, the Web, from a variety of sources both reliable and unreliable. And it is evident in their early efforts at news writing.
The issue is not their writing — most of my Rutgers students have a solid grasp of the various mechanical issues that seem to plague students in my freshmen classes at Middlesex County College. They can put a sentence together fairly well and link those sentences into solid paragraphs and so on.
The issue is that they are seeking to learn to use a form with which they have had little experience or contact. Not reading a newspaper — or even a newspaper on line — means that the structural components of news writing (good ledes, nut graphs, how to handle quotations) are all brand new to them. They have no reference points or models on which to build — or from which to steal — which is how all writers learn their craft. It adds a layer of difficulty to the already difficult processes of teaching and learning the news format.
Modeling, of course, is part of what we do in the classroom. I break down news articles every week for my students, attempting to show them the component parts and explain how they fit together. And they respond and they learn, but they are behind where they might have been were they regular readers of more traditional news and sports coverage. They are learning from scratch and many — hopefully most — of them will get where they need to go.
It must may take them a lot longer and a lot more effort to get there.
Send me an e-mail.
Hank Kalet 