Charlotte Allen writes:

Until just recently — this year, to be exact — at many of the nation’s journalism schools you’d think it was still 1973. That was the year the Watergate reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post helped topple a sitting president. Back then every college English major in the country wanted to work for a big-city print newspaper like the Post and become a celebrity investigative reporter like Woodward and Bernstein, nemeses of Richard Nixon, who resigned in 1974 during the Watergate scandal. Now, however, even Rick Redfern, the bearded, insufferable Woodward-Bernstein clone in “Doonesbury,” has lost his job, the movie State of Play, starring Russell Crowe as yet another old-school investigative reporter doing homage to Woodward and Bernstein, tanked at the box office, and newspapers are hoping for a government bailout (so far resisted by the Obama administration) on the theory that they perform a public service that taxpayers ought to subsidize. Journalism schools, which once cultivated the mystique of the pure-of-heart reporter speaking truth to power, are hastily revamping their antiquated curricula to conform to a completely different business model — part of which seems to be recognizing for the first time that journalism is a business, not a priest-like calling.

Speaking as a 2006 J-school grad here: This is substantially true, especially the bit about journalism students’ Woodward-Bernstein worship, but I think it’s been the case for some time that J-schools are focusing more on “New Media.” The trend just got a huge kick in the rear this year (as Allen demonstrates in the rest of the article) with the economic collapse. It’s becoming clear that the demise of the newspaper isn’t a long-term trend to keep in mind but an imminent disaster that demands an immediate reaction.

Of course, J-school graduates’ fates lie much more with the industry than with college curricula. The problem is that while information may “want to be free” — mainly because some people are willing to distribute, via the Internet, other people’s information for free — hardly anyone wants to get on the phone, much less leave the house, to collect information for free. The powers that be have to find some way to make full-time reporting on the local level pay, and so far, the Internet isn’t doing that.