As has been true of most of the milestones in my life, my itinerant 28-year career as a professor of journalism began almost by accident. Indiana University’s highly touted program brought me in after I lost the excellent job in publication management that had occasioned my living in Indiana in the first place. Up to that moment, I had never seriously considered teaching college, in part because my lone academic laurel was a lowly BA in English. But I already knew from working with the dean on our internship program that part of IU’s massive endowment fund was set aside for the now-and-then practitioner with a solid track record in genre; I never stopped talking to my dean about my track record. That was how I became an endowed professor.

I. School of Non-Thought

My love of journalism stretched back to when I was seven or eight. My news-junkie father would pull me on to his lap after dinner and read to me from the three New York dailies he took, supplying definitions and context as necessary. We kept encyclopaedias handy to fill in any remaining blanks.

These nightly press reviews went on for a few years, although at some point I moved beside my father on the couch. Beyond the father-son bonding, there was something important about these sessions, which I inferred from the sobriety of my father’s demeanour. The people writing in these newspapers, he told me, were “the eyes and ears for the rest of us” (his own brother was a respected New York columnist). They shaped our perceptions of what our world is and what it means; they helped determine whom we voted for and why. What a privilege to be that close to the beating heart of American life.

And what a responsibility, to get it right…

Some seven decades later, and three decades after being endowed at IU, evidence suggests that journalism is getting it very wrong. The American public certainly thinks so. And although volumes have been written about the unfortunate goings-on in the trade, relatively little scrutiny is paid to the academic forces that help shape those now disappointing the nation’s viewers, listeners, and readers.

It would be nice to be able to reassure a sceptical public that scholastic journalism will yield graduates who grasp the importance of honestly calling balls and strikes. I cannot do that here, alas. Having spent the past three decades straddling the fence between journalism’s academic and professional sides, I’ve enjoyed a bird’s-eye view of the cross-pollination, and gained a unique understanding of why anyone hoping that academic journalism will restore integrity to the craft is in for a long wait.