Cline: “I don’t like this statement…we do our students, and the citizens of the communities in which they practice, a disservice by encouraging (even) our (best) students to believe that good journalism must be practiced at big-time news organizations.”

Anna: “must”? this seems too black-and-white.

What if it’s empirically true that small town papers _typically_ “put fetters on their reporters and make them bow to sacred cows”? (AJR on Webb) Is it better to pretend there isn’t a difference, and let your alumni smack into reality once they get out, because you didn’t equip them with steering wheel or brakes?

Ideally you teach the reporter the (subversive?) tools to remake the small-town paper into a bastion of good journalism, but what would those tools be?

(I do agree with you that it _shouldn’t_ be true – that it shortchanges small communities. It seems where you and Schell differ is that Schell implicitly accepts that he cannot change the structural (economic) bias that makes it true, whereas you’re convinced that reporters can make a difference.)

(I am, here, assuming that it is true, based on not very much data. How could it be subjected to the discipline of verification?)

Cline: “We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that journalists are responsible for making democracy work.”

A: But…? this is teaching them to serve the public, isn’t it? We’re better off with them feeling responsible than washing their hands of responsibility (all Britney all the time), no?
(what am I missing here?)

I think your thesis is that the best is the enemy of the good.
but it makes me nervous when you disparage the former by terming it “arrogance”, if in fact that’s what you’re doing.