Goshen College students learn the promise and potential of journalism

More than two decades ago, at the end of a journalism internship, the editor looked at me and said, “So have we convinced you just to go work at The Gap?”

The answer was no. I went on to become a journalist.

This past semester, as I stood in front of students as the adjunct professor of “Comm 350: Reporting for the Public Good” at Goshen College, a similar question was on my mind. A lot.

How do you teach and encourage student journalists in this era of “fake news” and shrinking newsrooms?

I can’t tell them it will all be OK. I can’t tell them they will find jobs. If they are brave enough to seek a journalism job and find one, they may come to work one day and find out the publication for which they work has been sold, in a sense they themselves have been sold. That the new owners may decide to get rid of them or more likely the person next to them who has worked there longer and costs more to keep.

That’s not the kind of thing that inspires the modern 19-year-old college student. I did, after all, want them to keep coming to class. For some reason, the nine of them did, though perhaps more because I brought them snacks than anything they’d learn from someone who spent nearly half of his life in newsrooms.

As a freelancer, I’m not in a newsroom anymore. On the first night of class, I told them that our classroom was a newsroom. I was their editor. (I don’t recall urging them to pray for help on that last one, but perhaps I should have.)

My task was to make them better journalists. The class included the editor-in-chief of The Record, GC’s weekly newspaper, as well as the co-managers of The Globe, its radio station at 91.1 FM. The students had a range of experience in asking questions, doing research and turning both of those into meaningful stories.

We embarked on a semester of reporting and writing. We started on a project about CoreCivic, which in January was seeking approval to build a new immigration detention facility in Elkhart County.

The second week of class, all three Elkhart County commissioners came to our classroom to talk about the proposal and what they were thinking as they faced a possible vote.

I couldn’t keep myself from asking questions, but that night the students started asking these elected officials about how they approach such a decision. Those questions revealed the struggle by Mike Yoder, Suzie Weirich and Frank Lucchese, who mused on how they’d vote if this was a casino instead of a prison.

Soon after that night, CoreCivic pulled its proposal in the face of vocal opposition from the faith and business community. News happens. Landscapes change. So we adapted it to report on some of the players in the community and the events. The reporting and writing, along with a few sketches by student Nathan Pauls, became acivicscore.wordpress.com, a project of another GC communications class.

The students heard from stellar journalists such as Katie Rogers from the New York Times and Julie Beer of The Goshen News. They read great work by others and worked on profiles, enterprise news stories, personal essays and a deadline project on Ignition Garage.

I want to believe that I showed them the promise and potential of journalism while also being realistic about how it can break your heart. As Rogers has said, “Journalism doesn’t love you back.”

In these students, I saw eagerness and potential. I saw them wanting to learn how to ask better questions, write better ledes. I tried to edit them vigorously and grade them fairly.

I don’t know if any of them will grow up to be journalists. Even if they don’t, I hope they have a better understanding of what it means for those who do it, those who are called to it, if even for a time.

It’s a tough time to be a journalist, but the world needs people to ask questions, to report clearly, to get things right. This democracy needs good journalism to hold people accountable. Every community needs people to tell its stories and document its life.

I hope the students in this class got that. They may still opt to go work for The Gap, but perhaps at least they’ll support and consume journalism like the green vegetables we all need.