Celebrity

I tried to think of a way to make this post have something to do with the media or with education--maybe something about how the media make a celebrity a culture or somesuch. But really, I just thought it was cool that I saw Alex Rodriguez at 61st and Madison today. I regret not stopping to ask for an autograph, but he was with a woman, and obviously on his way to dinner. It seemed gauche.

It does make me at least momentarily regret also not taking my job with the Yankees. Alas, I guess I'll just stick with academia.

I saw Keanu Reeves last week, actually. I don't regret not getting his autograph nearly as much.

The Applied Liberal Arts

As I sat in my qualitative research methods class this Spring, I thought a lot about the intersection between various ways of gathering and creating knowledge in the world. It's not the first time I've thought about these overlaps, either. What a journalist does when gathering information is not necessarily all that different from what a doctor does, in some ways, for instance. Asking questions, putting together narratives, et cetera. And when I'm teaching the research paper in my intro classes at LaGuardia Community College, I make some of the same connections. Adding up the collective knowledge of the world, shaking it around a little bit, adding your own insights... Voila, a new contribution to that collective knowledge.

But then this started to become a little bit more solid as Harty Mokros's qualitative class. We started discussing ethnography--the research tool of the anthropolgist. The researcher immerses herself in a culture, and makes her research breakthroughs by writing down her experiences. This isn't really any different than some of the best journalism. You go to a place where news is happening. You experience. You describe. Maybe there are no footnotes, but it's the same approach to information gathering.

When I was an undergraduate, I took a sociology course. It was my freshman year, and I was attracted to the idea of a course about deviance and social control. I did OK, but I didn't really get it. The same thing happened--I forget if it was freshman or sophomore year--when I took cultural anthropology. For one thing, I didn't understand the fundamental difference between sociology and anthro--aren't they studying the same subject matter? Why are they different departments? At the time, I didn't think about it enough to figure it out. But the difference isn't in what sociologists and anthropologists study; it's in how they study it. Anthropologists do what I outlined above. Sociologists rely more on surveys and statistics.

This all may sound simple to people who figured this out long ago, but it's all apropos to finding a place in academia for journalism. Journalists can learn quite a bit from all of these research methods. The nature of journalism doesn't require quite the same rigor that academe does, however. At the same time, academics can learn from journalists, too. There's a grittiness that they bring, and a voice that allows journalists to translate complex ideas for a general audience.

I've come up with a nascent theory that journalism could function in the academy as a sort of applied liberal arts, in the same way that doctors practice applied chemistry and biology and anatomy and engineers practice applied physics and accountants practice applied mathematics, in a way. A liberal arts education provides the sort of broad knowledge base that journalists work with every day. There's a natural connection there, and it's one I intend to continue to pursue at least through graduate school, and quite probably beyond, thoughout my career.

Six months later

The blogging impulse nags at me again.

I searched "Press Critic" on Google, and found myself on the first page with Jack Shafer, Jay Rosen, and Jim Romenesko. And searching for "The Wayward Press" puts me ahead of Liebling himself.

If the Google algorithm is going to reward me with such comparisons, I feel I need to do a better job with the blog. It's a duty, somehow.

Perhaps an update will be coming soon.