'Improving the practice of journalism' Michael Parks reflects on seven years at the helm of the journalism school Read the full transcript (PDF)

In June 2008, Michael Parks, the reporter and editor who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the end of apartheid in South Africa, will conclude his term as director of the journalism school. Writer-in-residence Norman Corwin asked Parks to share his thoughts on his tenure.

Norman Corwin: I’d like to begin by asking what you have concluded to be common to both major divisions of journalism – professional and academic – and what you consider their major differences.

Michael Parks:  The way I characterized what I’ve tried to do here was to improve the practice of journalism to benefit the society that it serves. And so
I guess the difference is that in 38 years in daily journalism, I was doing journalism, and whether I was a reporter or an editor, we did it every day. Here, I’m trying to improve that practice by educating men and women to do journalism by critiquing the way journalism is being done, and by suggesting better ways to do things, so I suppose those are the differences. The similarities, I think, are in the basic thrust of good journalism serving democracy, whether you’re doing it or trying to improve it.

NC:  What do you consider the up- and downsides of your office, and what would be the essence of whatever you recommend to your successor as director?

MP: One of the things that [Associate Director] Patricia Dean and I have really worked to do is to create within the faculty, and thus within the school, a sense of community; that we are interested in each other, that we share common purposes, that we want to do our work well, that we want this to be a good place in which to work, that we care about each other, and we hope that these values get carried over into the work that our students will do when they go forth. I think back to what friends of mine in the African National Congress used to say before they came to power, and they would have these long meetings trying to discuss and resolve issues, and there would always be somebody who said, “Why don’t we just make a decision?” and the response was you can’t build a democracy by undemocratic means. Apply that to a school like this. We can’t expect our students to be working to improve the performance of society by seeking truth and sharing understanding unless we create a community that is focused on that.

What will my successor do?…I don’t know. I will help in any way I can, but I think that the challenge of this job is thinking about ways to improve the practice of journalism, to keep your mind on why we do journalism the way we do it, what are our traditions in American journalism, and to make sure that those values and that sense of ethics continue, even as journalism changes rapidly. You know we’re in an era of active change, and some of the changes are discontinuous, that is it is not a straight evolution. The digital transformation of so many means of communication has amplified the social and political and economic changes under way, and so teaching journalism in this turbulence is hard. Preparing students to do good journalism while everything is changing is hard, but good things are never easy. And so I hope that my successor sees in the challenge great reward.

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