My 0.02 on what the $100K journalism MA means for America

Oh boy, Columbia Journalism School — arguably the best j-school in the nation — recently announced a new MS degree in Data Journalism, prompting critics to ask whether the hefty price tag is worth it.

The cost of the one-year program at Columbia is $100,000, according to Poynter. Graduate school in America is expensive. Let’s unpack what the growth of exclusive programs like Columbia’s means for the future of journalism.

The first criticism is that you can get into data journalism without a $100,000 degree. So are students just stupid? Do they just make poorly researched decisions?

No, it’s actually not that easy to break into “journalism.” You need clips to get the opportunity to get assignments to get more clips. So, school is an artificial environment that gives students that opportunity. People go to journalism school for the same reason they get an MFA — it’s credential and comes with priceless contacts in the industry. Plus, if you have the time and money, there are many positive externalities associated with a graduate degree.

It’s also easier to break in if you have in-demand abilities like data journalism or multimedia skills. As a second benefit, data journalism feels like a safe bet because you can go into marketing or PR as a backup.

A recruiter for startup recently told me that we want people who can take data and communicate that data and tell stories. A proven aptitude for data is a valuable skill in business.

Critics of the Columbia program also claim that reporters can learn to use data by taking free or low-cost workshops or online courses. I think that is a big assumption. I was in one of those IRE workshops in June, observing a crash-course in R, and I’m not sure it’s something best picked up on the fly.

Being a journalist is hard, being a data wonk is hard, and putting it together is exponentially harder. If you mess up as a data journalist you can get sued, so the stakes are even higher. It’s understandable why people want a solid foundation in data journalism and are willing to go back to school to get it.

In June I received a similar degree — albeit an MA — from Stanford’s journalism program, where the focus is data journalism. When people ask me if it was worth it, I say, I don’t know yet.

The wonderful thing about being a journalist is that the work is fascinating and meaningful. But you have to be willing and able to pay the price to do work with an impact. That’s a personal decision that journalism students must confront, but it also has implications for the profession as a whole.

The crux of the issue is the application of computational methods to journalism has the potential to lower the cost of investigative reporting and create possibilities to tell new stories that would be impossible to report on without computers. Bots, algorithms, natural language processing, crunching data with Python, SQL queries are all tools that can help reporters be more effective. These tools have great, untapped potential for journalism.

As the industry declines, however, journalism is shedding reporters and leaving large swaths of the American heartland underserved. So, the problem is students learning data journalism in graduate school are paying for an expensive education, which could disincentivize them from taking reporting jobs.

While most of my cohorts are toiling in unpaid summer internships — I’m on the job hunt in New York, where my partner got a job. I don’t know how my younger colleagues are paying their student loans. The interest on my loan was about $10 per day. And, I received generous support from Stanford and had personal and family resources to fall back on after a decade of working in tech.

Local and regional news outlets are disadvantaged on every front, but especially when it comes to onboarding new talent and taking advantage of new technologies.

Local news rooms are relatively small and resource strapped. Why would a new journalist with in-demand data journalism skills go work there when they could get a better job at a larger news outlet? So, data teams are mostly clustered in large national outlets or non-profit investigative outlets in the coasts or large cities.

The rise of costly specialized data journalism programs at elite schools like Columbia and Stanford is one more force that pushes talent and resources towards national outlets and coastal urban areas.

That’s not to say it’s Columbia’s job to set up its educational programs with the best interests of local journalism in mind.

Journalism school favors people with people with the privilege and resources to pay for graduate school and then go into a profession with a low return on the financial investment. No amount of diversity training or workshops at conferences will help journalism reflect the diverse society it serves if the economics of being a journalist favor the elite.

Journalism schools are shaping the profession in unintentional ways. The greater question is what is the role of journalism school in America today? And what should it be?

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