Berkeley's Neil Henry Takes On New Journalism Reality

Though only a near-decade removed from my time of studying for a Mass Communications major at UC Berkeley from 1995-99, there are precious few professors who I can recall having made significant impact. In the mass communications department, a pair I distinctly remember was the dynamic duo of Neil Henry and Thomas Leonard, who teamed up to teach a number of the core classes to the major, and helped shed light both on how today's media has been shaped through history, and where they expect it to go.

Today, Henry's name gained significantly more recognition around the Web, as he penned a editorial for the San Francisco Chronicle focused on what he termed "The decline of news", set in motion by a massive reduction in advertising spending with newspapers, which in turn eliminates funding for reporters and investigative media. Instead, money has moved online, to sites powered by robots, he says, and that this move, amid reduced professionals in the newsroom, in favor of amateurs, will be significantly damaging, resulting in "a world where the craft of reporting the news fairly and independently is very much endangered; and with it a society increasingly fractured, less informed by fact..."

Old media is in a state of crisis today. Readers are leaving in droves. Newspapers and magazines are folding. The money isn't there, and media is not always financially rewarded for a job well done. Henry raises the alarm bell that with fewer trained journalists, or "trained watchdogs", as he puts it, those creating scandal could get away with it. While he admits that the millions of blogs online offer a new source of news, he doesn't believe the quality to be on par with those who have studied the craft and gone through journalism school.

Most controversially, Henry says that companies like Google, who have risen the top as new media leaders, should accept responsibility for media's future, and they should support journalism schools, even as their algorithms serve to replace more traditional methods of collecting the news. But here, while I respect Henry a great deal, and enjoyed his classes, I have to disagree. Google as a business has no new edict to save an industry under assault. The industry itself as a whole needs to change to survive.

It is worth noting that Henry took a very old world approach to his perceived crisis. He wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper, albeit one with a strong technology foundation. Yet, even though he went the old world route, I found it not through a printed copy of the Chronicle, but through new media - the blogosphere. While bloggers do read the online version of the Chronicle, it is the new media which is spreading his message.

Other bloggers who are quite one sided in their own views of the argument, like Mathew Ingram, Scott Karp and John Battelle, champion continued evolution in media, as I do.

Some of my biggest frustrations with the Mass Communications course content at UC Berkeley was the slowness to pick up on the Web's sure impact on media. Though it was in a class taught by Henry and Leonard where I first learned about The Drudge Report and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the attention to the Web was little and far between. When in another course, the professor's idea of a new media lecture was to show a video on the founding of Yahoo!, after I had offered to help prepare a more in-depth presentation, I simply stopped attending her lectures for the remainder of the semester out of pure frustration.

A decade ago, the onus for change in journalism was there, and those calling for adaptation by the new leaders to help out those left behind simply missed it right before their eyes. It is not Google's obligation to bail out the Chronicle or to train the journalism students at UC Berkeley. It is Google's obligation to make money for its shareholders, and continue to improve its products, period. They are not a charity organization. If a generation of journalists finds the road ahead hard, then personal decisions will have to be made, and companies will have to make adjustments. That's business.

Intellequity: A VC-like Concept to Tackle Higher Education Debt

With June right around the corner, college campuses around the country are seeing commencement exercises and graduation ceremonies filled with pomp and circumstance, as they hand thousands of students pieces of paper that exit most of them from the campus and into the world of earning a living. Some may already have started new jobs. Others may just be starting that search now. But for many, the years of schooling have already put them deep in the hole financially. While the mood on the day of graduation is a gleeful one, the issue of debt is very real, one that could be haunting some for a very long time.

Uber-blogger Chris Pirillo highlighted this issue in a two-parter today on Student Loan Solutions and Student Loan Debt, concluding that he doesn't know if student loans are "more of a hindrance than a help." The major issue, he writes, is that forward-looking young adults are expected to get an education, whether we can afford it or not, meaning some are weighed down "with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt before we’ve even had a chance to see whether or not our higher education was actually worth the price of admission."

While I was in college, I occupied an odd middle ground where my parents' collective income was too high to qualify me for financial aid, but their month to month struggles meant that the tuition checks going home weren't always covered on time. Some months, the way I'd find I was negligent was that my meal card for on-campus dining would simply stop working, sending me to nearby eateries in Berkeley, bleeding away my already low cash on hand. But the good news was that I managed to pull through, getting a degree in four years without establishing debt. Other friends of mine, also entering their early 30s, did qualify for financial aid, but also racked up debt, some into the six-figure range, and to date, haven't made much headway. In fact, one of my best friends, whom I've known for half my life, may have to file for personal bankruptcy just to clear the deck and start over.

In the heady dot-com mania of the late 1990s, when everybody had a business plan sure to make millions, I had come up with what I saw would be a sure solution - a program I had dubbed "Intellequity". The concept was that instead of basing loan agreements on current cash on hand or current income levels, I would set up a company that doled out loans to promising students or recent graduates. The better the prospects seemed for a student, the better the loan terms would be. Effectively, based on a detailed matrix of experience, grade point average, major, brand name of the attended school, and a small battery of aptitude tests, and interview, we would offer loans that would not come due until the applicant began their first salaried job.

The student would not incur a specific dollar value of debt at all. Instead, the way the "Intellequity" project would be funded was through asking for a small percentage of future income over a set period. For example, if $10,000 were the loan amount, and the candidate were to have established a 2% payback rate over an 8 year period, they would pay Intellequity 2 percent off the top for 8 years. Assuming the applicant made $500,000 in salary over the 8 year period, the pay back would be the same $10,000. But if they made more, the company would gain a profit. If they made less, it would be our loss. If the payback rate were higher, say at 3% or 4%, the return would be that much greater as well.

Those applicants who didn't see their career paths pan out they way they had planned would not be equally burdened as those who had skyrocketed, those who we had taken a chance on. The risk would have been transferred away from the student who started accruing interest right away, but instead, to those of us funding the individual. In effect, it would be acting like a VC firm, not for a business, but for an individual. Some investments, as with VCs, would be duds. Others could make millions. And Intellequity would become a partner with the student, finding them better paying jobs and opportunities, hoping to push the individual toward a route that would make them more money in the end.

Would bringing a VC-like environment to the student loan process work for everybody? Of course not. But it sure would make things interesting, and it would eliminate the problem that some students find themselves in from the day they walk the stage and throw their mortarboards in the air - one of being alone and in debt from the very beginning.