Just something to think about. Journalism in the American university system...didn’t really exist until the 1950s. If you went to most colleges before that period and had dreams of being a newspaper guy...you got a degree in literature or just skipped college and worked yourself up from junior reporter with no degree to full-reporter with no degree.
This entire game of training people how to be journalists only caught on in the past forty years. The curious thing is that we’ve had this spiral of newspapers downward for about the same period. Makes you wonder.
Interesting point. I didn’t realize that journalism programs were developed so recently. I wonder if the left supplied the impetus for such a program or if it seemed like a ‘natural’ progression at the time. I took a journalism class in school and, while I liked the instruction in concise, clarity, the rest of the content seemed to be a waste or covered by other courses (English, photography etc.) I look at some writers that I admire, like Victor David Hanson, and note that journalism coursework would labor to simplify and homogenize (lowest common denominator)his writing to the point that I would not read him anymore.