We Don't Need No Stinkin' Expertise
Ever read a New York Times editorial and think, "These idiots don't know what they're talking about"? Turns out, you're exactly right.

But this isn't just a problem with the NYT editorial board. I'd hazard a guess that 90 percent of reporters write about things they have no training or expertise in - and their news coverage often forms the knowledge base that similarly untrained newspaper editorialists use to write their editorials.

It is a failing of the basic way journalism has been taught for the past several decades. Too much of the courses and lab work for a journalism degree focus on the craft of journalism itself - basic interviewing and writing and editing skills, learning the AP Styleguide rules, learning to compose a story in "inverted pyramid" format, and such.

Too few journalists get a formal education in a subject area that they will then go cover. Most business journalists never took a business course in college. Most journalists who report on the economy didn't study economics. Most reporters who write about the environment have no scientific training. Most reporters who write about healthcare and medicine have no experience or education in the healthcare industry or no medical training. That's why so many news stories offer no insight, merely heat and light. It's why stories about the economy, for example, boil down to a collection of competing quotes from politicians and economists with agendas - and give you the unshakeable feeling the reporter might not understand a single word of that Greenspan quote he just used. It's why so much journalism is formulaic, uninformative and dull.

That doesn't apply to all business reporters, of course. Right here in Nashville, one of the best business journalists you'll ever find, David Fox at NashvillePost.com, traded commodity futures for a couple years at the Chicago Board of Trade, before returning to Nashville to be a stockbroker with Prudential-Bache. Later, he became a business journalist at The Tennessean, then founded NashvillePost.com. Think he knows what he's writing about? Of course he does.

I first was hired to be a "business reporter" in 1990, after about three years as a "general assignments" reporter for a trio of newspapers in Texas and Tennessee. (Details here.) I had never taken a business course, never run a business, never read a business book, never bought a stock or a bond or a T-bill, never seen a public company's financial report, and hadn't sat in an economics class since my junior year in high school, nine years earlier. Needless to say, my readers suffered for the first year as I learned the basics of business on the fly.

Fourteen years later, I've covered a few thousand business stories and read perhaps a hundred business and economic books, and I understand business and economics rather well. But I'm self-taught and still learning. It shouldn't have been that way. J-school should include fewer classes on the craft of journalism and more on the subjects journalists are likely to cover. Journalism students ought to minor in something unrelated to journalism. Better than that, they should major in something other than journalism - which, after all, is a craft the basics of which can be taught in a few courses, and the details of which are best learned by on-the-job experience.