Feedback

A few years ago, I was invited by City University of New York to lecture on any issue I deemed important to journalists. I chose accepting feedback, both from editors and readers.

When I gave my talk, it was clear that most of the university officials thought I was coming from outer space. One tactfully shared that he expected to hear me talking about something like journalistic privilege, confidential sources or plagiarism, since at the time those issues were at the forefront of many journalists’ minds.

I chose feedback because I increasingly had become convinced that it should have been on journalists’ minds, although it was not.

Since then, there is mounting evidence that I was right. This is particularly true in newspaper journalism, where a new school of thought has emerged and everyone from the top executive down to the newsroom clerk is expected to be sensitive to what people want or think about news.While the current frenzy is not totally reflective of what I had in mind when I did my lecture at CUNY, it is worth pointing out that in the past the culture of newspapers had been one in which feedback was not considered a core value. That is actually pretty shocking when you stop to think about the nature of newspapers. But it is not surprising when you consider the way most journalists have been trained over time to think about their work.

One of the chief messages I took from my undergraduate training was that I had been given a trust – a somewhat sacred trust – as a journalist that empowered me to make choices about what people needed to know. In essence, it was my duty to find and write stories that were important to people, to be a “watchdog,” looking out for the public’s best interest.

Robbie Morganfield, executive director of the Freedm Forum Diversity Institute at Vanderbilt University, is a veteran journalist and journalism educator. He worked as a reporter, editor and columnist at daily newspapers across the country, and taught journalism at universities in Arkansas, Texas and North Carolina before joining the Freedom Forum in 2002. He has journalism degrees from the University of Mississippi and Ohio State University.