J-School Confidential

"For our inaugural glimpse inside the archives," notes the New Republic, "we bring you “J-School Confidential,” Michael Lewis’s perceptive and hilarious look inside Columbia University’s graduate program in journalism. At a time when our profession is reassessing its very purpose, it’s good to have a reminder of what journalism is—and isn’t."

From the piece...

The morning I arrived, the associate dean for academic affairs, Steven Isaacs, was putting his class through its paces. A masters of science in journalism requires about seven months of study. The first semester consists of core courses, including a course in ethics taught by Dean Isaacs. The second semester consists of electives with names such as "Developing a Personal Writing Style," "Reporting on Ethical Issues in Science," "Broadcast News: Content and Management" and "Research Tools." The title of Isaacs's course was "National Issues."

The first morning session I attended was given over to an exercise designed to cultivate "the creative side to the thinking process," according to the description in the course brochure. Isaacs removed a UCLA baseball cap from the head of a student named Karen Charman, placed it on the table in the middle of his classroom and told his students that they weren't to leave until each had thought of 100 ideas for articles based on the UCLA cap. For the next two hours there was no sound in the room save for the clicking of the ancient radiator. By the end of the class all but one student had compiled a list of 100 ideas. The failure had come up with just fifty but argued that they were fifty especially good ones.

The next week Isaacs distributed the fruits of the exercise. They ran for ten pages, single-spaced, and began:

men wearing more hats as monoxidil fails

the rise of popularity of caps

baseball caps as appropriate head ware [sic], even for jogging presidents

the appropriate ways to wear a hat

Isaacs then moved from the conceptual to the practical: the actual act of composition. He assumed a position in the middle of the room beside an overhead projector, which beamed short, unsigned articles onto the wall. Isaacs had assigned the students to write sidebars to a New York Times article announcing the wedding of Rupert Murdoch's daughter. They now loomed large before us. We read the various efforts while Isaacs, himself looming large in a brown suit and a Minneapolis Star baseball cap, swapped the pages in and out. Once we'd finished reading each piece, Isaacs, sounding like a gentle parody of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, offered advice about how not to write. Early on he had banned from student assignments the use of all adjectives and adverbs, as well as the verb "to be." The students ceded the adjectives and adverbs, but struggled to preserve various forms of "to be," which, after all, had served journalists nobly for centuries. Having lost the skirmish for "is," they retreated and retrenched to defend "isn't." But Isaacs advanced mercilessly, and the class finally agreed to eliminate "isn't," "were," "was" and "has been" from their practice articles.