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reflections on the century
At the Millennium, a Student View
CJR asked a group of Columbia Graduate School
of Journalism students their thoughts at the millennium. The participants
were: Ali Aslan (Turkey), Alexandra Cann (Massachusetts), Alexa Capeloto (California),
Mickey Ciokajlo (Michigan), Liz Mineo (Peru), Jeremy Olshan (New York), Matthew
Strozier (New York). Here are excerpts from those remarks:
The Century's Biggest Stories
The invention of the automobile and how it changed our lives. (Mickey Ciokajlo)
The end of colonialism. It was a story we didn't cover well. It still has incredible ramifications that probably aren't completely understood and journalists still don't know how to write about the after-effects. (Matthew Strozier)
Two events come to mind. First, the red scare in the fifties and how the press was manipulated. More recently, I think about the children killing children, Columbine and the other shootings. You can almost see the learning curve for the press covering these events. (Alexandra Cann)
The moon landing thirty years ago. It brought us a whole new universe. We just celebrated the anniversary and they replayed it over and over. It was still riveting to see how mankind landed on the moon, and to see the dignified silence of the TV reporters. (Ali Aslan)
The fall of communism. I think the press did a good job of covering it because half the world was expecting it to happen and so when it did the press was eager to tell the story. (Liz Mineo)
In the last decade there have been a zillion “stories of the century.” O.J. was the trial of the century, Floyd was the storm of the century. We have this view that anything going on now is huge, and tend to forget what happened fifty or sixty years ago. But I would say the feminist movement is a big one, and it did follow in the steps of the civil rights movement. The breaking down of racial and gender barriers are huge stories that keep unfolding. (Alexa Capeloto)
Changing Journalism
There has been this amazing change where journalism now oversteps the bounds of privacy, and in doing so, delves into things that really don't make a difference in how the world runs. Also, with the Internet and live television, reporters don't have time to stop and think. That's frightening. You're faced with a deadline or you're faced with five million viewers wondering what's going to happen next, and you don't really know but you feel obligated to say something. (Cann)
Speed. Everything has gotten so much faster and it's overwhelming me. As a result I feel like I'm always falling behind. I find it difficult to stop and reflect because there is always something I have to concentrate on. (Capeloto)
What's going on now in journalism is what I call the Studio 54 phenomenon — pushing the envelope, seeing how far we can go before we close the place down. It seems to be an unwritten rule to see how much we can get away with as journalists. I don't believe there is moral decay in society. And I don't believe the Lewinsky scandal and the coverage of it indicated such decay. I think we are better off than we were in the 1950s. And like Studio 54, I think human nature will tell us when it's time to close down. (Aslan)
Fundamentally what matters is the story. And no technology — not the telegraph, photography, television, or the Web — has taken away the importance of a good story. How they're told may change, but that they're told will not. (Jeremy Olshan)
News in the Future
I picked up The New York Times today and I thought, my god, how many trees did they have to cut down for this? But I also thought I could never not read a newspaper, and instead read everything on a computer screen. My little sister has grown up on a computer, and I wonder if in ten years it will seem odd to her to pick up a newspaper? I don't want to say newspapers should disappear, but I think they will and I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. (Strozier)
People say you can't take your computer on the subway or into the bathroom. But you can get up in the morning and print four or five stories to take with you. The interactivity of computers puts you more in touch with readers. As more people get plugged in, maybe it will help rebuild credibility, because we will be touchable again, the way we were a generation or two ago. (Ciokajlo)
I love print. I love the smell of papers. I love the way they feel, the way the words look on the page and I would be devastated if that disappeared. At the same time, I also have a younger brother who is glued to his computer and finds picking up the newspaper a nuisance. The Internet is a great thing. I use it all the time and there is a place for that. But there will always be a place for print. (Cann)
