“The future of journalism is bright,” Morgan State University Dean DeWayne Wickham told students in a BYU News Reporting class on Dec. 6.
Wickham spent decades as a columnist at USA Today and interviewed Barack Obama and Fidel Castro, among others. He also covered the O.J. Simpson murder trial in California in the early 1990s. He is the founding dean of the School of Global Journalism and Communication at Morgan State in Baltimore.
Wickham says the current furor over “fake news” is nothing new. Presidential candidates and presidents have always complained about news coverage, he said. The Hutchins Commission in 1947 grew out of a government effort to create a censorship board for newspapers. Wickham said news will always be relevant, even while technology will continue to change. He said he is optimistic about the future of journalism.
Jacqueline Jones, assistant dean and department chair for Multimedia Journalism at Morgan State, accompanied Wickham to BYU and also spoke to students about the future of news.
“I think a news organization needs to stake out whether it wants to be first or whether it wants to be right,” Jones said in response to a BYU journalism student’s question about speed of news production cycles today.
Wickham said breaking news is often incomplete and even erroneous. We should all be critical consumers of media, he said. It’s not that journalists are trying to get it wrong but just that the nature of the process of trying to understand and convey the truth about complicated issues and events is messy.
Wickham told students news reporting is like salesmanship. It doesn’t start until someone says no. Reporters get information from the people they know so they have to get to know the right people. When Wickham covered the Simpson trial, he only went to the courthouse twice. Instead of sitting in court every day, he made contacts with clerks of law firms and got information from them. He got to know them and their families.
A student asked Wickham what it was like to interview Obama and other presidents. He said the key is to first talk about what they want, and then eventually move to the tough questions the reporter wants to ask.
Wickham and Jones came to Provo as part of an ongoing exchange program with the BYU School of Communications. Morgan State, a historically black university, has previously hosted BYU faculty. The two programs are working on developing collaborations in which students from each university will travel to the other school for a period of time to engage in mass communication projects.
LINKS
https://comms.byu.edu/morgan-state-university-faculty-present-on-current-challenges-of-journalism/