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CUNY has campuses throughout the five boroughs in the most diverse of neighborhoods, and that's where aspiring journalists can find out about the real New York, far away from the vacuous glitterati of midtown Manhattan. That's where our journalism students should study, at one CUNY campus a month.
Beyond the traditional journalism classes taught from textbooks, the assigned readings should be every major book about New York City over the last 50 years, including but not limited to The Power Broker and Gotham. Students, in return for free tuition (paid for by the media conglomerates that make billions in profits every year), will be required to sign a pledge promising they will never write one word about Donald Trump, Michael Jackson, Barry Bonds, Woody Allen, models, actors and actresses, Al Sharpton and all the other annoying media hounds who hog far too much space in our newspapers ...
They must have a heavy dose of economic theory, so they don't wind up like the "reporters" who were outclassed on that topic in May during a debate with Stuyvesant High School students. This will help them in explaining the various flimflams of Wall Street and city leaders.
One of the courses offered, according to the CUNY administrators, will be "how to spot a story." That is the easiest part. It's called taking the subway every day to the end of the line and walking around; reading the Law Journal, to see who is suing whom, and the City Record, to see how the Mayor is selling or leasing your land; attending community-board meetings, where the rubber hits the road on civic issues. Turn off the TV and read the weeklies; they have more information about our neighborhoods and their changing ethnicity in one issue than all the dailies combined.
Of course, there is one major dilemma with all this theory about how to cover the real news of our city, the news that affects all eight million of us.
Where would any of it get published?
- Jim Callaghan, "A Boot Camp For the Media," new york observer July 7, 2004
posted July 07, 2004 in print.