Category: higher education

The shrinking news hole for education

It should come as no surprise to those of us in higher ed PR who try to get media attention for our institutions, but now it’s official: according to a new report from the Brookings Institution, the traditional news media pays scant attention to education.

Education coverage makes up just 1.4 percent of news covered on a national level, according to the report. And most of that coverage has little to do with learning.

Oddly enough, the amount of coverage in 2009 was an increase over the past two years (0.7 percent in 2008 and 1 percent in 2007.) “This makes it difficult for the public to follow the issues at stake in our education debates and to understand how to improve school performance,” the Brookings report concludes.

Brookings conducted an analysis of national media coverage of education in newspapers, news Web sites, network and cable television and radio during the first nine months of 2009. As CASE points out in its summary of the report, the researchers “found that newspapers and radio stations placed more emphasis on stories related to school finance and budget cutbacks, network television to stories on H1N1 flu or health issues, cable to politics in education, and online sites to education reform.”

I guess those of us in higher ed should be thankful that we get the lion’s share of the coverage. Twenty-seven percent of that national media coverage pertains to colleges and universities. Community colleges don’t fare so well, earning just one-tenth of the coverage four-year institutions receive — a 2.9 percent slice of education coverage overall.

http://genflux.chartle.net/embed?index=23618&content

The Brookings report offers several suggestions for improving the amount and quality of news coverage of education. Topping the list is a commitment by educational institutions to make communication with the news media a priority. Hey, that’s one of the reasons we’re in this business, right?

Craft, profession or something in between?

Do you consider your higher ed marketing vocation to be a profession or a craft? Or maybe the better question is, Do you consider yourself to be a professional?

A lot of us like to talk about professionalism. We talk about taking a professional approach to our work — whether it falls under web development, graphic design, media relations, market research, writing, videography or any other aspect of this broad umbrella of marketing and communication.

But are we really, technically professionals?

Twenty-six years ago, when I was a fresh-faced graduate of journalism school, it was understood that the field I was about to enter was a noble craft, not a profession. One reason for that distinction was that a profession, in the traditional sense, requires an intensive academic study and typically has at its core some sort of code of ethics. The practice of medicine, for example, is one obvious example of a profession. It requires an advanced degree and its practitioners must swear to uphold the Hippocratic Oath. Accountants, lawyers and engineers also have similar requirements, and they must be licensed or registered by some oversight organization.

Journalism, though, does not require intensive academic study. In fact, three-fourths of the curricula required for my bachelor’s degree was in fields other than journalism. Also, some of the best journalists around don’t even have journalism degrees. A few don’t even have college degrees, period. (This is rarer now than it was 30-40 years ago.) And a code of ethics? The Missouri School of Journalism, my alma mater, has something called The Journalist’s Creed, which devised by Walter Williams, who founded the school and attempted to turn journalism into a profession. (He even began the creed with the statement, “I believe in the profession of journalism.”) But it wasn’t a full-fledged code of ethics, and no one who completed the academic requirements for the journalism degree had to swear upon it before they were allowed to go forth and commit journalism.

In the murky field of higher ed marketing, however, people enter from all walks of life. Things are not quite as clear cut. It’s obvious to me, though, that marketing does not fit the definition of a profession because it does not require intensive study in that particular field and it does not require a code of ethics. (Maybe it should, but that’s another kettle of fish.)

The idea of our work as “craft,” however, may rub some of us the wrong way. We like to think of ourselves as professionals in the sense that we take pride in our work and we do it well. But many of us also take more of an artisan’s approach to our work. We learn by doing, from experience and from experiment. (So do doctors, frankly, although we hope that we won’t be the subjects of their experimentation, and we hope much of that was completed in med school.)

You could argue that I’m making a big deal about semantics, and that the definition of “profession” and “professional” has changed over time, becoming more generic. But my point is this: the next time you talk about what you do as a profession, or talk about yourself as a professional, maybe you should rethink your words and think about what it is that you really do. There’s nothing wrong with being a master at one’s craft.