The Communication Connection Between Newspapers and Universities

What do newspapers and universities have in common? Being a former Communication educator and researcher, I would argue that they are both in the business of communicating. Universities communicate knowledge; newspapers communicate—well—news.

There’s another way that newspapers and universities are similar. In his recent editorial entitled “What Colleges Should Learn From Newspapers’ Decline” in the latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Kevin Carey argues that they are both institutions that are dying. Newspapers are dying or already dead; Carey mentions the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the San Francisco Chronicle as examples of papers that have or are about to go out of business.

Why? It’s simple; newspaper advertising has dried up. Advertisers don’t want to pay the big bucks it costs to advertise in print because newspaper readership has plummeted. No, not following the news—people still do that; they just don’t get their news from newspapers. They get it from television or---more and more---online. And even though most major papers have online sites, the advertising revenue from this source is not nearly enough to sustain the expense of actually running a newspaper. Let’s face it, anyone with a computer can post a “newspaper.” They can express their opinion and discuss daily events; I do it every day. What they can’t do is hire investigative reporters to travel to China or Russia or spend hours at city hall tracking down a story. Running a great—even a good—daily newspaper today is very expensive.

You may agree with Carey’s argument that newspapers are dying. But what about universities? Isn’t that a bit of a stretch? Harvard and Yale still seem to be making ends meet. There are thousands of universities and colleges out there doing relatively well, aren’t there? Well, yes, at least for the moment. But, like newspapers, universities are finding that their customers are--more and more--going online. Taking college courses online is becoming easier, and more institutions are offering online courses. And it’s not just a few stock undergrad courses here and there. (My online friend Flit at Back to School for Grown-Ups discusses not only taking but teaching courses online in a recent post.) Is it too much to imagine a day in the not too distant future when most college students will be able to, probably even prefer to, not only take a few courses online, but also get their degrees online in the comfort of their own home, at a time convenient to them?

Believe me, I am all for anything that will improve our lives. The computer has helped reporters in their jobs and I doubt that there are many good journalists who aren’t also proficient Googlers. Likewise, online courses have made college educations possible for many people in difficult circumstances who could never hope to achieve this goal otherwise.

Even so, for every improvement society makes comes loss. Just because news producing entities proliferate does not mean that the quality of news reporting improves. Although I am an avid follower of many current events and political blogs, I would not equate such blogging with investigative journalism (nor, I think, would most of these bloggers). When we think of a college education, will we someday just think of our children sitting in their bedrooms, taking courses at their computers? Is this the college experience we want for them? For me, there is more to college than just the courses and the credits. Students learn from being with new people, living in a different environment, trying new things. They can get some of that online, but not all.

What do you think? What is the future of newspapers? Universities?

(photos by webanalyse and acidcookie @ www.flickr.com)