Columbia Journalism School professor: ‘F*ck new media.’
Columbia Journalism School professor: ‘F*ck new media.’
New York Magazine notes that at Columbia University, one of the nation’s top journalism schools, many professors are advocating a “more significant shift” to new media instruction, with one suggesting that students learn about live-blogging. But they’re up against professors like Ari Goldman, who believe new media is completely irrelevant. In fact, on the first day of his class, “Research and Writing 1,” Goldman told students, “F*ck new media“:
“F*ck new media,” the coordinator of the RW1 program, Ari Goldman, said to his RW1 students on their first day of class, according to one student. Goldman, a former Times reporter and sixteen-year veteran RW1 professor, described new-media training as “playing with toys,” according to another student, and characterized the digital movement as “an experimentation in gadgetry.”
“This is like saying that writing books is an experiment in playing with printing presses,” writes Yglesias.
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Looking at that photo reminded me of Kip, Napoleon Dynamite’s brother.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:00 pmGoldman didn’t mince any words, got straight to his point.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:04 pmSounds pretty straight forward to me.
I have another F word for this.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:09 pmFire Goldman. Period.
Fine, but whoever dies w/ the most toys, wins ;)
March 12th, 2009 at 4:15 pmHmmm. Someone seems very nervous that the ‘new media’ will make ‘professional’ journalists obsolete. Maybe even put him out of a job. No students = no need for teachers.
Cry me a river, old man…
March 12th, 2009 at 4:16 pmI like toys :) Can I has more?
March 12th, 2009 at 4:17 pmResearch and Writing 1: Becoming Obsolete, Theory and Practice
March 12th, 2009 at 4:18 pmDon’t worry, Professor Goldman, I’m sure there’s a museum out there who will make room next to their wooly mammoth exhibit for the likes of you.
Perhaps that Intelligent Design museum will let you be one of the humans who rode around on the dinosaurs.
PEACE
March 12th, 2009 at 4:18 pm“Playing with toys”?
“Experimentation in gadgetry”?
Didn’t they used to say this about rockets, wireless radio and personal computers?
This guy has no vision.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:18 pmNew media allows YOU to control the flow of information so YOU get the whole picture. An important part of being a professor is the ability to think for yourself, so why would a professor rely on prepackaged corporate-sponsored information?
March 12th, 2009 at 4:19 pmIt’s not like whatever he is teaching is sinking in ANYWAY!
Other than a handful of “True” journalist I can think of that have been in the business for a long time.
I can’t think of anyone in this profession that acts like they went to school, got a degree, and performs thier job like it matters.
Juz sayin
March 12th, 2009 at 4:21 pmlooks like someone needs to be put out to pasture.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:25 pmI can’t think of anyone in this profession that acts like they went to school, got a degree, and performs thier job like it matters.
Not too many, that’s for sure. Anyone have a list?
I’d put Seymour Hersh at the top of mine.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:25 pm“Talking pictures? Ha, it’s just a fad.”
“Henry, no one is going to buy that gawd awful noisy thing when the already have a horse.”
“Telephones have to have wires, ya see.”
March 12th, 2009 at 4:30 pmBesides, everyone knows newspapers will be around as long as there are fish to wrap and birdcages to line.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:31 pmIt’s terrifying to think students at Columbia need to be taught how to do something as inherently simple as liveblogging.
If Professor Goldman really sees the direction in which media has already gone as playing with toys, it’s time for retirement.
Does he teach class by candle light too?
March 12th, 2009 at 4:33 pmLead, follow, or get out of the way, Professor Goldman.
I’d settle for “get out of the way.”
March 12th, 2009 at 4:44 pmHaving heard for a month about who twittered what and when, and whether W will have a FaceSpaceBookPageMyTubes, I can feel a bit of what the Old Professor is saying.
He’s there to teach them Journalism, not what kind of pen to use. If you’re going to go out and “do journalism” you should know what that is and how it does and doesn’t has and hasn’t worked, whether the tools you use to do it are analog or digital, literal or virtual.
Speaking of Journalism, I’ve seen a lot more interesting stories making headlines today than “what some cantankerous old professor at Columbia said”.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:54 pmYes, and newspapers once sneered at television news as being a novelty. After all, it lacked the permanence a newspaper could provide.
Then President Kennedy was assassinated, and the television networks had us all riveted to our sets. They did an admirable job of getting the news to us as events unfolded — even broadcasting their film footage wet, straight out of the soup. The event itself was a tragedy, but it finally got broadcast news some grudging respect from the print media.
For the next few decades, broadcast and print media coexisted — each offering something the other could not. Print media had permanence. A newspaper could be kept indefinitely, and the reader could read the news at his convenience, but one had to wait for the paper to come out. Television could present news literally as it happened, but you had to be there to watch it when it was broadcast.
Now we have internet and blogs. The internet can present the news as it happens, but the reader can get the news at his convenience — the best of both worlds. And blogs make the news interactive for the first time. We now have the technology to have it all.
It’s not just a fad.
March 12th, 2009 at 5:06 pmtombaker Says:
He’s there to teach them Journalism, not what kind of pen to use. If you’re going to go out and “do journalism” you should know what that is and how it does and doesn’t has and hasn’t worked, whether the tools you use to do it are analog or digital, literal or virtual.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
_____________
This is what I was thinking at first, but on reflection I don’t believe the analogy holds. Yes, journalism students must learn the fundamentals of news-gathering and copywriting and whatnot, and many of these fundamentals are not changed by new media. But many of them are, and any student of journalism history will instantly see this.
The invention of paper and ink made the whole cuneiform tablet thing obsolete, and then the printing press enabed a massive democratization of information by taking the power out of the hands of just a few learned scribes. The telegraph extended the reach of journalists and enabled field reporting from remote locations. With radio came the invention of the concept of live news and breaking news, a concept that was expanded when television added pictures into the mix. Then the 24-hour cable nets expanded the concept of what news is – replacing traditional news-gathering and package-cutting with in-studio analysis, in order to fill up those 24 hours.
Each of these changes wasn’t just a new pen. It fundamentally altered the way news was percieved, concieved, and consumed. The new technologies all fed back into the old ones – the telegraph created wire services, radio and TV began generating print stories, and the blogosphere is now affecting the content of the cable channels.
New media needs to be viewed in the same context, and it would be worthwhile for those training the next generation of journalists to be out in front of these new trends.
March 12th, 2009 at 5:18 pmI didn’t mean new media is a fad.
There are fads within it, however. Like anything else.
There need to be actual journalists though – media type notwithstanding.
Like any other professional practice, there is more to know than what the tools are and how to use them.
I would let a Doctor use a laser on me, but I would not allow “Dr. Hussein Matt” to use a laser on me (no offense, Dr. Matt).
By the same token, I don’t expect Sy Hersh’s next bombshell article to appear on his MySpace page, or exclusively on iTunes.
March 12th, 2009 at 5:21 pmand, I want to know that someone is teaching the next Sy Hersh.
A big-kid school like Columbia, I’m sure, can and will make room for new technology in their curriculum – somehow I don’t really believe Columbia students are egregiously suffering from want of access to technology.
March 12th, 2009 at 5:26 pmI’ve been saying that the Internet is a fad… for the last 20 years!
March 12th, 2009 at 5:31 pmAll them tubes and such are so newfangled and scary for the older professorial crowd. Back in their day, they used clay tablets and had to sharpen their stylus with their teeth.
March 12th, 2009 at 5:33 pmMy Depression-era Grandparents were sophisticated enough to understand that if you gave a batch of Republican Bankers enough rope, they’d end up with the deed to your farm.
Was something lost, as we made our way into the shiny, shiny future?
Or was it knee-jerk reactionism on the part of the “technologically-empowered” young’uns?
“Geez, gramps, these new shiny future-banks are nothing like what you knew about way back when – these are called Investment Banks, and they use computers, so no one could possibly get ripped off.”
March 12th, 2009 at 5:53 pmI don’t fundamentally disagree with the professor. The basic skills must be learned, no matter what form the media takes. Without traditional media sources, what are blogs like this going to link to?
March 12th, 2009 at 5:57 pmI had an English professor in college who considered Hemingway to be dangerously modern and refused to teach anyone past Henry James. You have to wait for them to die off, because otherwise they never really go away; they just show up as “emeritus” and continue to preach their archaisms.
March 12th, 2009 at 6:02 pmAncient republican cave man speaks – Fcuk Fire!!! It BADDD.
March 12th, 2009 at 6:35 pmnice speech, go Ari Goldman GO.
March 12th, 2009 at 7:22 pmSomebody is fu*king the old media, in case Prof. Goldman missed it.
Rocky Mountain News RIP
March 12th, 2009 at 7:23 pmColumbia School of Journalism is not what it used to be. The Dean better check this clown out.
March 12th, 2009 at 7:29 pmFunny. I only read newspapers on-line.
March 12th, 2009 at 9:49 pmYa, but I agree with him if he’s only talking about Twitter.
Seriously, why the hell are Senators sending text messages constantly about the most retarded, pointless BS?
Twitter seriously needs to die.
March 12th, 2009 at 11:08 pmwhy the hell are Senators sending text messages constantly about the most retarded, pointless BS?
Because most Senators are retarded and pointless themselves…
(No offense to the mentally challenged, who are actually smarter than most Senators).
March 12th, 2009 at 11:31 pmIn the 90′, I tended to agree with him.
March 13th, 2009 at 3:55 amIf you read WIRED back then, it was chock full of New Economy this and Long Boom that and breathless interviews with flooz.com’s net-billionaires and so on. Push technologies! Bandwidth wars! What’s Tired and What’s Wired! No matter how neophile you were, at some point you wanted to go ‘Bah, humbug!”
Print wasn’t dead because of the mere existence of the Net–and people weren’t automatically ditch their papers for HTML.
But what they (and I) didn’t see back them was the Republican media power play: consolidate, own, and control the media! The Soviet Union has fallen, so control of the US meant control of everything! He who controls the spice controls the universe!
And so the Republican oligarchs disenfranchised half the American population–and half the population were forced to make a move that, based on technology alone, would have taken a decade or more.
True, you have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to have seen that transformation–but it wasn’t all that long ago when a huge portion of my progressive friends said ‘oh, I don’t own a computer’ with the same smugness that they denied owning a TV.
Drop dead.
March 13th, 2009 at 9:58 pmHa ha. So much for the Ivy League.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:14 amIT WAS A JOKE. Ari Goldman made a joke in class. New York Magazine printed something UNCREDITED and OUT OF CONTEXT. Would you like something you say tongue-in-cheek to a private, 12-person group of people to be splashed across the pages of a magazine – and devoid of its humor? I attend the school. It is quite good. And this flack is ridiculous.
March 19th, 2009 at 1:43 am