{ "id": "1997-decemberjanuary-what-teaching-is-really-like", "slug": "1997-decemberjanuary-what-teaching-is-really-like", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-decemberjanuary-what-teaching-is-really-like.html", "year": 1997, "month": "December/January", "monthNum": 12, "headline": "What teaching is really like", "kicker": "Lesson Plan", "author_name": "Jeff South and Steve Doig", "author_title": "Professors", "affiliation": "Virginia Commonwealth University and Arizona State University", "summary": "Two former journalists who became university professors describe the demanding reality of academic teaching, revealing that despite its appealing reputation, professorship requires as much work and stress as newsroom journalism, with extensive preparation needed beyond classroom hours.", "keywords": [ "teaching", "journalism", "professors" ], "topics": [ "Education", "Investigative Methods", "Journalism & Newsroom" ], "technologies": [], "full_text": "What teaching is really like\n\nBy Jeff South and Steve Doig, Virginia Commonwealth University and Arizona State University\n\nIt sounds so tempting, to ditch the frenzied pressures of the newsroom for the sedate, ivied halls of academia.\n\nTeach a few courses, spending perhaps 10 hours a week in classrooms filled with eager journalists-to-be. Be part of a respected institution of scholars who prize your research and technology skills. Take summers off, but enjoy a year-round salary. And do all the freelancing and consulting you can - it's considered a credit to the university.\n\nThat glowing job description is legendary. Its allure has encouraged some of the number-crunching propeller-heads among us to consider new careers as journalism professors, teaching computer-assisted reporting. After all, anyone in a newsroom who can calculate percentage change reliably already has been nicknamed \"professor.\"\n\nBut before you surrender to this warm and fuzzy vision of leisurely semi-retirement, take a reality check. Teaching, at least teaching well, is every bit as demanding and harrowing as analyzing and mapping election-night precinct returns on deadline. University life can be as frantic and challenging (and political) as life in a newsroom. And colleges had more on-the-job fatalities than newspapers did in 1995. Oh, and about those \"10 hours a week\"? For each hour in the classroom, plan on spending four or five more preparing your lessons - and praying you won't fall flat on your face like a bad comic on open-mic night.\n\nNot that we want to discourage you. As longtime journalists who recently became professors, we have no regrets about joining The Academy. We see the rewards every day: Students buzzing with energy and enthusiasm learning the skills needed to help the news media survive and prosper in the 21st century.\n\nBut when we switched careers, we had few clues beyond tweed jackets and a whiff of chalk dust what a professor's life would be like. We want to share lessons learned since then, and for You, too, soon may face similar career-change choices.\n\nAs more and more journalism schools realize the importance of computer-assisted reporting, they will be encouraging, even recruiting, CAR-adept reporters. The authors of this article illustrate the trend: We each spent two decades in newsrooms, specialized in CAR, then recently became full-time professors. Here are some things we learned that you should know if you, too, are considering making the jump from newsroom to classroom:\n\n1. Teaching is hard work.\n\nYou're often barely 24 hours ahead of your students, madly grading their work from the last class and trying to create meaningful lessons for the next. Reporters-turned-professors typically spend more time each week doing their new jobs than they had spent doing their old ones.\n\nMany of us learned writing in the newsroom, where a better writer or a tough editor coached us one-on-one. In a typical journalism class, you'll have 20 students who need that kind of tough-love coaching.\n\nIf you don't invest the time, students know they're being cheated - and they'll be rightfully angry: They're losing far more than the cost of a newspaper.\n\n2. Being an expert is necessary - but not sufficient - to make you a good teacher.\n\nWhen standing before a roomful of students, you have to be as much a performance artist as fount of wisdom. You must learn how to engage students, generate discussions, anticipate questions, set and enforce rules, explain, listen, explain again. Remember those boring lectures back in college where the professor droned on and on? Today's students don't like them either.\n\n3. Though we both think that working with students is our most important task, teaching still is only one-third of a professor's functions.\n\nWe're also responsible for research/scholarship, and for service. Research can be doing full-fledged academic studies, developing new training materials, publishing an occasional article, and so on. As for service, we are expected to work with journalism professionals and organizations, advise student groups and publications, and serve on myriad committees. Often, you need to spend about 50 percent of your time on each of those three functions.\n\nAs a CAR expert, you are likely to be appointed to a slew of university advisory committees: on curriculum development, technology, faculty recruitment and other subjects. Many weeks, you'll spend more time in committee meetings than in the classroom. As a faculty member, you also spend considerable time advising students. Sometimes it's on official matters like selecting courses, graduating and getting a job. In addition, you'll often be asked for advice on unofficial topics ranging from immigration problems to apartment hunting to help with a problem in some other class. Walk-in visits from students are fun but time-consuming.\n\n4. Students and reporters have different learning styles.\n\nAs the CAR wizard in your newsroom, you were used to working with reporters focused on learning a particular computer skill so they can get their story in tomorrow's paper. But to journalism students, you must teach a continuum of skills and show how they fit together and could apply to any number of stories. Reporters are quick to make the connection between data crunching and the story. They don't need much direction after you've run that list of school bus drivers against the list of drunken driving convictions. But students inexperienced in journalism may have trouble seeing where the story is headed. As a professor, you'll spend a lot of time helping students conceptualize stories, not just SQL queries.\n\n5. Students defy the stereotypes.\n\nThey're not unmotivated slackers snoring away in the back rows. They're not necessarily computer whiz-kids, either.\n\nThese days, many students work part-time or even full-time jobs. Some are single parents. And they're taking three, four or five other courses as well as yours.\n\nMost aren't willing to learn by rote, simply swallowing what they're told without challenge.\n\nClassroom discussions on ethics, diversity, civic journalism, invasion of privacy and other topics often are as interesting and heated as any we've heard in a newsroom.\n\nCompared to a newsroom, a journalism classroom generally is filled with a much wider range of abilities and weaknesses.\n\nYou'll have some students who haven't learned to conjugate verbs properly, and a few who can write better stories and CGI scripts than you can. It takes time and thought to tailor lessons, assignments and grading strategies for such a diverse mix.\n\n6. Just as newspapers still struggle to mainstream CAR into the reporting process, journalism schools are struggling with how to put it into their curriculum.\n\nThere's no widely-accepted model of how CAR should be taught: Stand-alone courses, integrated into existing courses, or some hybrid. As the new CAR expert on a university faculty, you may be called on to build a program from scratch.\n\nAlso, you may be surprised at the limits on what you can teach. Academic freedom is very real, but your dean will decide what courses you will handle, based on the needs of the school. You can't just barge in, whip together a course in spreadsheet reporting, and require students to take it. Because of accreditation requirements, journalism students take only a fourth of their credits in journalism.\n\nBy the time they have taken the mandatory courses, they'll have room for very few electives. That's why you start looking seriously at ways to work CAR concepts into other existing courses.\n\n7. While some parts of the university may be on the cutting edge of technology, journalism schools often are lagging.\n\nThey've computers, mostly Macs, largely for newspaper design. As a professor, you may be hard-pressed to find the CAR hardware and software you used back in the newsroom. Moreover, school budgets often are tighter even than those in the newsroom; getting that faster CD-ROM, that software upgrade, even that trip to NICAR's next data extravaganza, may require some blood, sweat and tears.\n\nAgain, we hope this doesn't scare you off. The work may be considerable, but the satisfactions are immense. And you'll find it stimulating to learn and practice these new skills at mid-career. If you bring from the newsroom the same dedication to knowledge and pride in doing good work that you practiced there, you'll make a happy - and successful - professor.\n\nSteve Doig can be reached by e-mail at steve.doig@asu.edu. Jeff South can be reached by e-mail at jcsouth@vcu.edu", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "1997-decemberjanuary-beginners-lesson-in-teaching", "score": 0.193 }, { "slug": "2001-julyaugust-teaching-car", "score": 0.156 }, { "slug": "1996-september-get-your-training", "score": 0.126 }, { "slug": "2001-mayjune-preparation-pays-off", "score": 0.124 }, { "slug": "1996-january-reisner-new-training-director", "score": 0.117 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-decemberjanuary-what-teaching-is-really-like.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-decemberjanuary-what-teaching-is-really-like.json" }