Bay Area J-Schools

Take a look at this article about University of California, Berkeley, j-school dean Neil Henry by the university's public affairs office, and see how he comes across as a glass-half-empty kind of guy.

"When you consider the hustle, the bustle, the chaos of information in American society now, the rants, the cant, the political biases, the advertising, the marketing that pollutes information—things that masquerade as truth but aren't—that idea of keeping your eye on the truth, and a commitment and a fidelity to it through an endeavor like this, becomes even more important," they quote him saying. "It is not old-fashioned or anachronistic. It is absolutely critical."

It's not that we disagree with what he's saying. It's just that, in a chaotic period like one we're going through, anyone can talk about the challenges, and about how much has been lost, and about how tough it is to hold on to the good parts. But a leader will talk about the opportunities and how they can't friggin' wait for the future to arrive because of how awesome it's going to be. In other words, someone who sees the glass as half-full.

Maybe Henry is that kind of guy. If so, it's too bad he didn't come across that way in this piece.

If the field of journalism weren't under assault enough as it is, now comes news that the private information—including social security numbers—of almost 500 UC Berkeley j-school applicants may have been compromised in a security breach.

The Daily Californian is reporting that a hacker broke into the private segment of the j-school's primary public server, in which information about 493 people who applied to the school between September 2007 and May 2009 was stored.

The breach took place in July, but campus technology officials told the Californian that there was no indication "the information had been stolen or misused."

Still, the school sent out notices to the affected individuals on Tuesday, the Californian said.

"What is happening now is, the dilettantes don't show up. We get the ones resigned to lives of poverty and chastity. They'll do journalism because they really believe in it."

So says UC Berkeley J-school professor William Drummond in Nina Martin's piece in San Francisco about the future of journalism.

"[J]ournalism will become even more a labor of love," Martin writes. "It will be rare that a journalism salary can support a mortgage in Berkeley and a kid in private school. In the new news era, most of us will have to eke out a living by juggling multiple gigs, just like consultants, novelists, and artists do (or we'll marry doctors and lawyers instead of each other)."

Martin's piece does an excellent job of surveying the landscape in the Bay Area, from the startup hyperlocal blogs, like Albany Today, to the situation of the Examiner and the Chronicle, to the role of philanthropists.

Read it: "Newspapers are Dead. Long Live Journalism"