You must be smart enough to learn new things quickly. You must be prepared to be overloaded at your job and to deal with hardships and criticism. You also have to be good at working with people and keeping good relationships with your interviewees."
These are the qualities that make a good reporter, according to Chen Chin-jung (陳進容), deputy editor-in-chief of a Taipei daily newspaper, the Liberty Times. These skills, he continues, are acquired partly on the job, partly in school, and partly by being born with them.
So, how can a young, would-be reporter hone the abilities necessary to satisfy editors such as Chen? Since students have no control over the qualities they are born with and, typically, no job experience, academic training is the only of Chen's three categories over which they have a measure of control. Journalism departments, then, are crucial in preparing students to enter the competitive media arena.
Meeting the needs of editors in Taiwan has become more difficult over the past five years. Since 1988, the year the government lifted the ban on new news papers and removed the maximum page count limitation, newspaper work has become faster paced and more competitive. Today, the island's two hundred papers are looking for writers who can cover increasingly complex topics with a minimum of training. As the newspaper industry matures, reporters are expected to be able to analyze difficult issues quickly and to hunt down facts and contacts aggressively. Meanwhile, the public is beginning to demand that reporters have higher professional standards and ethics.
Making the grade―With the cutthroat competition of print media in mind, universities are seeking ways to ready their students to meet editors' needs.
Can students develop the necessary skills while at university? This is the question debated by those involved in Taiwan's nine undergraduate and graduate universities offering journalism or mass communications degrees. Although journalists worldwide argue about how the classroom can best prepare students for the newsroom, the discussion is especially heated in Taiwan because there can be such a large gap between academia and the working world.
Most local college students have grown up studying under a traditional Chinese educational system in which teachers lecture and students take notes. This approach continues through university. The practices of questioning authority and of debating various sides of an issue are stunted by custom and logistics. First, it is disrespectful to challenge the beliefs of a professor or published author.
Second, there may be little or no opportunity for students to debate an issue many classes are simply too large to allow individual students to speak up. The average undergraduate class has fifty to sixty students. Simply put, many institutions of higher education do not create an environment conducive to honing aggressive interviewing and writing skills. Thus, entering the cutthroat field of journalism can be quite a shock for the 2,700 journalism majors who graduate each summer.
In his first year as a reporter, Liang Ge-hui says the emphasis placed on journalistic ethics in college has proven useful; writers must often make judgment calls.
To help, there is a growing movement among university journalism departments to tie their studies more closely to the profession. One concern shared by many universities is that students spend too much time on required courses. By law, all students must complete 128 credits to receive an undergraduate degree. Of these credits, two-thirds to three-fourths come from classes required by the Ministry of Education (MOE), the college, or the department. For example, all undergraduate students take twenty-eight credits of general requirements including the doctrine of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Chinese literature and history, and English literature. After journalism majors add to these the university's own requirements, they are left with little opportunity to develop an expertise in a chosen area such as economics, politics, or art history specialties that could prove valuable as a reporter.
"The required courses can be valuable," says Chen Ruey-jong (陳瑞中), editor of the daily Commercial Times in Taipei, "but the way professors teach them makes a big difference. I suggest that when they teach difficult theories, they also include information on current social situations or economic and political developments." He and other editors believe that reporters need a well-rounded background in various subjects, but add that students could get more out of the core curriculum classes if the subject matter engaged students more directly.
Meanwhile, many students believe that the required courses leave too little time to focus on courses applicable to their major. Lien Pao-ju (連寶如), a 19 year-old student at the World College of Journalism and Communications in Taipei, believes she is taking too many courses not relevant to journalism. "I think journalism students should take more courses closely related to the subject," she says. Specifically, Lien wishes she had the opportunity to take more writing and editing classes.
Ma Chi-shen estimates that only 10 to 20 percent of the journalism students at his university enter the newspaper field after graduation.
With these concerns in mind, journalism departments are offering students more say in determining their courses. For example, when Ma Chi-shen (馬驥伸) became chairman of the Department of Journalism at Taipei's Chinese Culture University in 1991, one of his first priorities was to give more flexibility to students. "I reduced the number of required courses to a minimum," he says. "Outside of the MOE', requirements, my students can freely choose their courses." Ma cut the number of required courses from two thirds of the curriculum to one-half. He encourages students to take classes out side their majors. He points out that the university is famous for its art, music, and dance departments. By taking advantage of such courses, journalism students can broaden their liberal arts knowledge.
The MOE is also taking steps to give institutions of higher education greater autonomy. In 1992, the ministry began allowing universities to determine their own M.A. and Ph.D. curricula. It is now considering allowing them to arrange their own undergraduate programs as well.
Most local journalism students have little opportunity to gain hands-on writing and editing experience. While U.S. students generally have ample chances to work on the school newspaper, yearbook, or newsletters, or to find an internship off-campus, Taiwan students do not.
Many universities require that journalism students earn one or two of their credits by serving an internship, but only the top students work on a newspaper. The rest take positions in advertising, public relations, or in fields even further removed from journalism. The island's major newspapers generally reserve two positions for each university with a journalism department, and only students with the best marks are selected. Each spring in Taipei, hundreds of journalism students vie for internships at about fifteen newspapers.
So many students, so little time to give all journalism majors a chance to work on the school paper, most colleges allow each student only two months of hands-on time.
Even for those chosen to work at a newspaper, the internships are generally too short to learn much. In order to accommodate all university journalism programs during the summer season, each internship generally runs for four weeks. "Reporters are too busy to teach our students," says Ma of the Chinese Culture University. "Overall, what students learn from an internship is limited."
Working on an on-campus publication is often more beneficial. Most journalism departments have their own newspaper, usually published weekly, which is written by students and overseen by professors. But positions on the school paper are also short-term. Universities must give each of the hundreds of journal ism students a chance to work on the school paper; thus each student spends about two months working on the paper during his or her entire college career.
"Working on the school newspaper helped me apply information from books to the real world, but working for a school paper is different from working in the real world," says Chiang Hsiao-lou (蔣孝柔), a reporter for the China Times Express who graduated from National Chengchi University in 1990. "In school, the people we interviewed were academics or government officials. We were taught how to design a series of questions and use certain interviewing techniques to get the news. But as reporters, we meet all kinds of people with completely different backgrounds. There might be a gangster who is also the owner of an entertainment business. You just don't know how to start an interview with that kind of person."
With limited opportunities to serve internships or work on student ·publications, journalism majors depend upon classes to gain writing and editing experience. But many of the thirty credits required of undergraduate students consist of theory, history, or analytic classes. In many universities, students take only four required credits of practical classes, such as news writing or magazine editing, during their four years of study. Even at Taiwan's best-known graduate school for journalism, in National Chengchi University, the curriculum includes only three practical classes: media internship, news editing, and news reporting and writing.
One university that has aggressively moved to emphasize practical journalism courses is National Taiwan University. When the university established its Graduate School of Journalism in 1991, then dean of the school, Yu Teh-chi, sought to model the curriculum after Columbia University School of Journalism, where he had taught for thirty years. But when the MOE learned that no classes on journalistic theory were included in the graduate program, the ministry protested. Eventually, the school accepted the MOE's request to add theoretical classes and Yu left the university to return to Columbia. Even so, the university's curriculum requires twenty-three credits in hands-on journalism classes such as in-depth writing, news editing, and practical problems of journalism, and only eight credits in communication theory, research methods, and statistics.
"We emphasize that our goal is still to train our students to be good reporters and that our teaching principle is learning by doing," says Chang Chin-hwa (張錦華), current acting dean of the journalism school. Of the required theory classes, she says, "I think these courses are necessary for reporters as well as scholars. Without these theoretical courses, our school would be like an employment agency."
Other universities have worked to develop a more specialized journalism curriculum. In the mid 1980s, the journalism course list at many institutions read more like that of a general, mass communications department. Students took classes in advertising, public relations, and radio and television production, as well as print media. In recent years, many schools have divided the department into journalism, advertising, and broadcast production programs, giving students a more specialized curriculum.
Attracting professional journalists to serve as part-time professors is another method of linking the journalism department to the working world. But because MOE regulations stipulate that professors must have an M.A. to teach undergraduate courses and a Ph.D. to teach graduate classes, universities have had a tough time finding qualified journalists. Few well-known reporters or editors have these degrees. The only way to get around the problem is to try and find journalists willing to teach under short-term contracts, which do not include standard faculty benefits.
Fortunately, it is becoming easier to find professionals who hold the necessary degrees. The main obstacle now is that many of them are not interested in teaching full-time because they don't want to leave journalistic circles and because academic pay scales are lower. Says Ma of Chinese Culture University, "It turns out that full-time professors all teach theoretical courses."
The World College of Journalism and Communications has found another way to overcome the lack of qualified professors. "We offer scholarships for our professors who want to go overseas to study further," says President Cheng Chia-lin (成嘉玲). To date, the college has sent five instructors to Ph.D. programs in the United States.
One trend affecting how students prepare for the working world is that some newspapers are beginning to look for reporters who can write on specialized fields. In fact, some are hiring graduates with degrees in economics, politics, art, or other subjects besides journalism. Chen Ruey-jong of the Commercial Times says: "Because I work for an economic newspaper, the situation is obvious. Many of my colleagues are college graduates who majored in economics, international trade, or finance. I always joke that a journalism major can only re port on social events."
At most newspapers, rookie reporters without backgrounds in journalism simply receive a one-week, crash course in media training. "After they learn the essentials―the five Ws and one H [who, what, where, when, why, and how]―they become a reporter immediately," Chen says.
Reporters who did major in journalism are finding that they need to gain expertise in a specific field. Liang Ge-huei (梁戈輝), a political reporter for the Independence Morning Post who graduated from Chinese Culture University in 1992 with a degree in journalism, has had to beef up his knowledge of politics to ready himself for the new job. "I took various courses in college," Liang says, "but they were all introductory courses. The subject matter was too superficial. During the nine months that I've been a reporter, I've pushed myself to read more books than ever before."
Liang stresses that there is one area in which those with a journalism degree are better equipped for reporting-journalistic ethics. "I was taught the concepts of journalistic ethics from freshman year on," Liang says. While he grew tired of having the same concepts drilled into him during his four years of college, he says the training has been useful since he began working. For example, he some times receives presents from persons or organizations he has interviewed. "I have been taught to be objective in reporting and not to be influenced by interviewees," he says, "but I don't want to embarrass them either, and they may just want to send their regards." He says that reporters without a background in journalism are generally not as concerned about clearing up potential ethical conflicts.
No matter what the major, the jump from college life to the life of a reporter is a tough one. Since 1988, the number of schools offering degrees in journalism or related majors has jumped from five undergraduate schools and three graduate schools to nine undergraduate and seven graduate schools. With local newspapers in a phase of fast growth and inter-paper competition, graduates from these schools face new pressures in newspaper reporting. Whether by choice or because there are far fewer job openings than students, most journalism graduates pursue careers in magazines, advertising, entertainment, or other related fields. "I estimate that only 10 to 20 percent of our journalism students enter the newspaper field," says Ma Chi-shen of Chinese Culture University. For those who do want to break into the increasingly fast-paced field of news paper reporting, it is more important than ever that universities help students bridge the gap between academia and the working world. •