Karen Dulop of Poynter, moderating the discussion then asked a group of invited speakers to react to this initial list of skills.

"Of all the competencies, which is the greatest? Of all the competencies, which needs the most attention? And of all the competencies, which ones are missing from our list? We invite you speakers to enlighten and challenge us."

Trevor Brown, Dean of Indiana University School of Journalism, as an educator spoke of the need, as a part of News Judgment, for students to understand the mission of journalism and for whom it is prepared:

"... 'Why competence?' and 'What competencies?' are extremely important to all of us in journalism education; they are the essence of what we're trying to teach...

"What I have to tell students is that the most inspiring, sometimes intimidating competency for journalists is making decisions, making choices. That's what's inspiring, that's what's enjoyable about journalism. Choices and decisions that will almost certainly affect what people think about and talk about, and that's a very important influence in this society.

"...They need to understand that they make choices and decisions for people who are themselves making choices and decisions in a very competitive marketplace, and that's one of the challenges of journalism.

"So when it comes to defining the priorities in this list of competencies, I start with the necessity for students to understand what the mission and purpose of journalism is, and for whom it is prepared, for what sorts of people is it concerned with. So probably I would put judgment and news judgment as a form of that, toward the top of my priorities. I would put values, the values of accuracy and impartiality and fairness toward the top of my values.

"We have to explain that journalism is first and foremost a job, and that therefore they need a reliable work ethic. That it is secondly a craft for which they need a set of skills, mastery of some skills. It is thirdly, a profession for which they need an education and a sense of commitment to certain values of conduct and practice. And then, of course, we hope ultimately it is a calling for which they feel a strong impulse, a strong desire to serve. And in this pyramid of job through craft through profession to calling, the self-interest of the journalist gradually evaporates so that at the top of the pyramid in that notion of themselves as serving a calling, they design their competencies for something other than their own self interest. That's the way I would define competency from the point of view of someone who is trying to still create young journalists."

Phil Meyer, Knight Professor of Journalism at University of North Carolina combined the elements of numbers and analysis into one box, scientific method which he sees as a crucial and natural part of journalism:

"Ten is too many. No one can keep track of ten concepts at once, so we've got to reduce these, and I'm going to make a contribution to that by offering to combine the two areas that I'm most interested in -- numbers and analysis and interpretation. I think they go together because they are both part of scientific method. My radical notion is that journalism needs to become more understanding and appreciative of scientific method.

"I know a lot of people are trying to push journalism toward art and it might seem inconsistent to try to push it towards science at the same time, but it's not that inconsistent at all. Numbers are the language of science, and journalism and science come from the same intellectual roots. They both come from the 17th and 18th Century enlightenment. The same thinking that led to the 1st Amendment, led to scientific method, to the notion that there is such a thing as objective truth, that we can get closer to it if we try, but all of our efforts are always tentative because somebody else with more powerful tools might get closer than we are and disprove what we happen to believe today. It was this sense of the changing nature of realized truth that led to the need for freedom of the press. I think this connection between journalism and science ought to be restored to the extent that we can.

"This does not mean that I suggest abandoning the need for more artistic journalism. The more complicated we make our analyses and interpretations, the more we need the artistic side in order to make it understandable.

"Now ... we're down to nine categories, but I'm going to undo my good work by suggesting a category that's been left out: ... understanding of the process and effects of mass communication.

"There is knowledge about the cognitive processes inside people's heads that helps visual artists construct their graphs and other illustrations in a way that will get the information into people's heads. We need to be more concerned on the word side and the number side as well about not just getting information into people's hands, but into their heads as well, and to take better advantage of the existing knowledge about processes and effects. We teach it in journalism school but not very well, and we don't require it...

"Finally, we are digging ourselves into a little bit of a trap here because the more we emphasize competence, the less likely it is that we'll find any one journalist who has all of these competencies mastered, which means an unintended consequence of this very good effort is that we're going to push the field toward greater and greater specialization. That will mean smarter specialties, but it will create a great need for managers who can coordinate those specialists. Actually, management is probably a competence that ought to be added to the list...

"Finally, as long as we're talking about unintended consequences, if this effort works, if we do increase competence, we're going to raise the cost of journalism because competence costs money."

The remarks of Mercedes de Uriarte, professor from the University of Texas, reflected much of the discussion that took place in Ann Arbor. She felt journalists must engender intellectual diversity if they are to portray accurately the issues about which they write:

"I speak ... as a great enthusiast of the five standards set down by the Hutchins Commission to define the role of the press in a democracy, most of which we are still working toward.

"The two that interest me most this morning are the first and the third. The first requiring a comprehensive account of the day's events, and the context that gives them meaning. Context is one of our greatest challenges to me still, even though this was set in 1947. And the third standard, a representative portrayal of the constituents in a society.

"Of course it is the journalist's job to strive toward these competencies, and the professor's job to make sure they are aware of them and to prepare them as well as possible.

"...I would like to expand [the competencies] to see the concern and discussion about diversity move beyond the concern for gender and genetic diversity -- both of which are important, no doubt -- but it is intellectual diversity that we still have difficulty including in the news. We have defined, unfortunately, diversity too often in gender and genetic terms as people who look at things little different but basically sound the same. We extend that too often to sources, who echo the things that we're most comfortable in hearing on both sides of a very narrow spectrum of debate. So color coded diversity I think needs to be reexamined for the ways in which it could be expanded.

"Intellectual diversity is, according to scholars of American culture, among the most difficult for Americans to accept. Perhaps that is why we have something called the alternative press, and I believe that the mainstream press needs to value its historic role a bit more. For example, one of my specialties is the history of Latin America, and it is the alternative journalist that provides the most value in my courses for explaining what was happening at the time. They remain the sort of best known historians in the account of immediacy.

"Alexis deTocqueville who talked about American culture once said that we had to worry about a "collusion of conformity" in this country, and we should think about that. Because ... we fail, I think, as journalists to understand class issues and to write about class issues in meaningful ways. Thus, we fail to [differentiate] between the poor and the working poor, between unemployment and the absence or disappearance of jobs. Indeed, there are several very recent books talking about the disappearance of work and its impact on our society -- something we really need to understand more. ...

"Some of the numbers around that issue, for example, are rather startling. According to studies, between 1987 and 1989, the unemployed took 8-1/2 weeks longer to find work than they did in the late 1960s, and that gap continues to increase. The proportion of men who permanently drop out of the labor force were more than twice as high by the late 1980s as they were in the late 1960s. These are men who have worked, who have working skills, and who can no longer find work. Then there is a 30 percent drop in real wages between 1970 and 1989 which continues to grow.

"So class, I think, is one of the things that we need to understand much better."

John Larson, Dateline NBC, argued that passion is the engine that drives competence, as is possessing and utilizing your sense of what is true:

"A friend and mentor of mine once said that our job as reporters is really pretty simple -- find shit out and tell people about it. (Laughter) It's crude, but accurate. He's won two Pulitzer Prizes for public service, so I listened.

"Of course doing that well -- finding stuff out and telling people about it -- really isn't all that simple when you come down to think about it. It requires all of our faculties -- our brains, our training, our families, our history, our hearts, the things we care about. It needs to be applied in order to get this done correctly...

"First of all, I noticed that really in the whole list of stuff there there's only one reference to passion. It's the engine that drives competence -- at least that's been my experience. Without excitement, without passion, without informed, intelligent love for what we do, for the people we meet, the people we talk to, the people we serve, any competence that we might acquire will wander aimlessly, and ultimately in longer careers will wither and begin to fade.

"Educators, you need to instill this first... Managers, you need to protect it, you need to elevate it, you need to focus it, you need to recognize it. If you instill it, you won't have to pay your reporters very much. (Laughter) They'll work for free. Let them do good work and get out of the way.

"I think technological competence ... at least in my experience may have been over-emphasized a little bit. While developing databases and analyzing spreadsheets is critical to many stories, it hasn't been critical to many that I've done or been assigned to...

"I would put these technological necessities that we've been given here maybe into a different list, a list I've decided to call 'Things a competent reporter must master, but if they don't, they have to sit near somebody who does.' (Laughter)

"We are collaborative and we have begun to specialize, and in newsrooms there are people with powers and talents different than yours. Make sure you know who they are and make sure you go to them when you need it. It's about knowing your own limitations.

"Regarding numerical competence, the reporting of numbers. I sort of squirmed in my seat when I started reading this one. ... I've always admired reporters who use numbers when they're not expected to and who don't use them when everybody else is.

"I remember a sentence that I read that said, "No one saw the shot that killed the little Bakersfield boy as he played during Monday morning recess, but 83 children heard it." Likewise, I always read budget stories, at least the beginning of them, because I have this morbid curiosity to see whether or not the reporter can get through the first sentence without mentioning a number. Or the second sentence, or sometimes the first graph. Then whether or not they've mastered the numbers to really tell me what they mean to me.

"Don't get me wrong. Numerical competence is critical. I think we can sum it up in three sentences and ten words. Don't be fooled by numbers. Understand numbers. Use numbers wisely.

"... Now I might add a couple of senses [to the pyramid of competencies]... Let me just start with ... a sense of what's true. It's pretty simple.

"A competent reporter has a sense of what's true, of what's half true, of what's partially true, of what's one-quarter true, what's flat out untrue.

"In the simplest sense, it's necessary for analyzing all the information that comes across our desks, even analyzing some of the assignments we've been given by our managers, even conducting the basic interview -- especially if you're in a broadcast.

"In the center of their chest, competent reporters have a shit detector. It looks a lot like a smoke detector, and it's right under the rib cage, and it buzzes when people say things that are untrue. Competent reporters pay attention to it. I've been in press conferences where the din of buzzing shit detectors is so loud you can't even hear what's being said up front. (Laughter) And very few reporters reported it. They don't pay attention to their own detectors.

"You need to reinstall the batteries once a year at Christmastime and make sure that it's active and working, and listen to it.

"Lastly, I know it's a shopworn phrase, but I will roll it out. We need to have a sense of excellence here. ... Unless a reporter has a personal vision, a strong personal vision of how creative, how wonderful, how meaningful, how powerful, what we do every day we go into the office, they will begin to lose their competence. They will not have the passion that is the very foundation of competence. Their vision, by the way, must be held inside. It's got to be their own. It can be educated, it can be instilled, it can be nurtured, it can helped along, focused, it can be mature, but it has to be there inside, held close to the heart, firmly, because the demands of our industry, at least the part of it that I've seen so far, will chip at it relentlessly.

"I have yet to have an editor or a manager come to me and say, "John, today I want you to go out and brilliantly serve the public. And in fact I'm going to give you everything you need to do it today. Just come to me, help me out, and you'll be excellent.

"If you're waiting for that to happen, reporters, it's not going to happen. You need to have it inside.

Peggy Peterman, former columnist of the St. Petersburg Times and former NABJ Journalist of the Year, sees as a cornerstone of competency, understanding and culling out the history connected to each story:

"I want to talk about something Roy Peter Clark and I have mulled over in the past, and that is my penchant for history. Reporters have got to have [a penchant for history]...

"Many of us think that we do. We do a limited amount of looking over the history, and then we rush forward with what we think is a good story. I believe we would all agree that the competence of the reporter or the news organization is linked up with the confidence that the average reader has in the reporter or news organization. The more competent the reporter and news organization, the more confidence the reader has that you're all doing the right thing.

"Even if you expose the ugly truth, you're doing the right thing, because you're doing it competently. I firmly believe that one of the cornerstones of competency is understanding, exploring, culling out the history of whatever you're writing on. History, the very sinew of everything, every issue. ... A story on taxes, water battles between surrounding municipalities, city development, crime, national state and local issues of health, all have histories.

"One of my greatest concerns are reporters who are not encouraged by their editors to locate, cull out the history of a community when assigned to write about it. It is the height of incompetence for an editor to say make a couple of telephone calls and give me so many lines on that community problem that they discussed at City Hall today...

"The tempers that flared may be from young people who remember an uncle going before City Council ten years ago, and a father who went just two years ago, and the church down the corner and its preacher that asked for an audience one year ago. The reporter needs to know that.

"...Covering the Asian, Hispanic, and African American communities means you have to understand the culture and the customs...

"It's going to take getting in your car and driving down to the Asian community or the Hispanic community or the core of it, or the African American community. And sitting in the backyards -- many of them don't sit in front yards any more because of the crime. Or when you get to a community where they sit on the front porches, sit there with some of those elders. Then you get the history. Walking the streets -- not unconcerned, but walking the streets intelligently. Not carrying your pocketbooks with you and what have you and demonstrating an arrogance, but walking the streets looking for knowledge.

"Sitting in the barber shops listening to what they want you to hear -- because you're only going to get what they want you to hear until you come back to that barber shop the next day and the next week and the next month, and after awhile they will definitely want to talk to you."

Jay Rosen of New York University spoke of several skills journalists must possess, the most important, perhaps, being skilled at love:

"... What should journalists be good at? Well, I say let's have journalists who are good at table setting, by which I mean finding a place at the table for everyone who should be at the table. Table setting is an art of inclusion, and it takes skill to know who belongs in the conversation, who's missing from it, and who ought to be talking to whom. So let's have journalists who set a fine table and welcome to it all who have something to day.

"Secondly, let's have journalists who are especially skilled at sympathy, by which I mean an ability to enter into others' experience so as to see the world the way it comes at them. To feel sympathy is one thing. To be good at sympathy requires investigation and imagination and patience in addition to a big heart. So let's have journalists who cultivate and refine their sympathy so as to discipline and balance their skepticism.

"Let's have journalists who are good at democracy. We often think of democracy as something that exists, but it's actually something that we make. If we make it, we have to know how to make it well. So journalists who are good at democracy are those who understand what it takes, everything it takes, to make a democracy work. To be good at democracy is to understand also where the thing lives -- not in laws or elections or information or even the Constitution, but in the spirit of people who in order to live together must also work together, talk together, think together, and build together a livable world. So let's have journalists who understand democracy well enough to find it -- not in a process, but in people who need to know how to become better and better at making democracy work.

"Let's have journalists who are good at possibility, by which I mean a capacity to see things as they might be so as to know better what they actually are. To be good at possibility is to avoid what the critic Irving Howell once called the provincialism of the immediate, what pretends falsely that the facts of the moment constitute the horizon of the present. So let's have journalists who see possibilities as well as problems, and who know what's real includes far more than what's been realized so far. This may mean something as simple as asking every day what would it take to get this resolved? Possibility.

"Let's have journalists who are good at hope, by which I mean something different than optimism. To be optimistic is to assume that things will get better because taht's the way things go. Hope, by contract, is not a prediction about the world, but a certain orientation to it. It is to act as if what we do still matters, that despite our problems and even our tragedies, the world has not gotten beyond us. Things are not out of our control. We're not at the mercy of events because there's always a chance we'll get our act together and act. So let's have journalists who are skilled at hope so as to not leave us informed and yet hopeless.

"Finally, let's have journalists who, strange as it sounds, are good at love. To be a good lover as a journalist is not to please your editor ...(laughter)... but to find pleasure in the public world, which is the journalist's domain. Love of language, which is public; love of public spaces, which is where people become a public; love of public life which is the joy of acting and talking and being together in public. Love of country, for there is no journalism without a country that makes it possible and values it. So let's have journalists who love journalism, yes, but who love everything else that gives it meaning as well.

"Table setting, sympathy, democracy, possibility, hope, love. Journalists who are competent in these ways will not only do things right, they'll do the right thing.

Jason Fry, Technology Editor of the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, talked about the news media's often failed attempts at appealing to a younger audience and offered ways that language and story selection might be more effective:

"There's something that we're worried about in journalism today. We're worried that we're not attracting young readers, and if we don't attract those people as they get older this could undermine not only our society but also our bottom line. I'd say that we should be worried about this for a simple reason -- that all too often we are excluding those young readers.

"The reasons we're doing that are, quite frankly, our newsroom culture is not always responsive to them. It does not always see their interests and their issues as stories. Sometimes when it does, those stories are written and edited in such a way that they don't ring true to those readers. This isn't good. As a friend of mine put it when we were talking about this, 'I think if you're going to write about youth culture the result shouldn't be something kids laugh at.' (Laughter)

"How do we escape that? I'd say first off, let's get rid of a much abused buzzword that will show us where we've gone wrong, and having done that, let's consider some ways in which we might make our newsroom culture more inclusive without violating our core values as journalists.

"The buzzword is called "Generation X", coined by Douglas Copeland in a 1991 novel of the same name, and then used by us to refer to young people in their early to mid-20s, chiefly to talk about how worthless they are... They're slackers, they've just graduated from college and now they're moping around being gloomy about their futures and unsure of their place in the working world.

"My question is, having been tarred with that brush at that age, was there anything new here? Was this a description of a generation and a prediction of its destiny, or is this more a description of what many generations face in their low to mid 20s?

"Today we in the media and our friends in marketing, continue to use this term to describe people in their early to mid 20s, even though the people that it was originally applied to are now pushing 30 or over it.

"Now think about what that says to people. It not only says we're going to make generalizations about you, it also says that when people come to take your place we're going to be too lazy to even invent a new term for all of you. (Laughter)

"... Now, what are some ways to attract new readers? Let me just throw out some points for discussion. ...

"Language. I don't think there's any reason to write stories about young people using "young language" particularly slang. Now not only might you get it wrong, you might feel the need to explain it excessively, and frankly, I can't think of anything more offputting to reading a story in which your own language appears with "sic" or is explained. This says you are the alien.

"Let me also say I think all of us have had a teacher, say in junior high school or high school who we admired. I'd ask yourself, did you admire that teacher because they aped your dialogue, or was it because they spoke to you with respect and with empathy? I think that's the way to get readers.

"Story selection. Children love the movies and love music. People in their late teens eat out. People in college tend to travel a lot. Why is it then that a lot of our restaurant and travel sections don't seem to appeal to people with early to mid 20s earning power and early to mid 20s vacation time? I'd say let's broaden it a little. Young people do not necessarily want to be included by you in a section called "Young People" that comes out once a week. (Laughter)

"As a final thought, I'd say this to you. That you may not have to look too far for the resources to deal with this. They're probably in your newsrooms right now, today.

"Most of us know in our newsrooms who the up and comers are, who the young people are who we have our eyes on. I would suggest to you that you don't want to appoint someone youth editor, or come up with them and anoint them as a spokesperson for their generation or anything artificial like that. But I'd keep in mind, they are there. You might use them as a touchstone, as a sounding board and say does this make sense? Is this the right focus? Is there something we can do better? Who knows? In the end, you might gain a couple of readers."

Sandy Rowe, Editor of the Portland Oregonian and the President of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, spoke of the growing need for subject expertise as the public brings more and more of its own knowledge to the stories it consumes:

"There have been many good ideas discussed this morning, but I have not yet heard the case for subject expertise. The problem is this. Journalists are generalists. In fact, many of us went into the profession because we were told you don't really have to know very much about anything to be a journalist. You just have to be broadly curious, you have to know how to dig, you can have this knowledge that's just wide as the widest river, but an eighth of an inch deep, and you will do just fine as a reporter. And if you really have knowledge only an eighth of an inch deep, you might get to be an editor. (Laughter)

"So what we have done for years and years is to try to pass off fact gathering as understanding. Or worse yet, to try to pass off fact gathering as, indeed, knowledge. It is not.

"We haven't been quick enough in the last couple of decades to recognize that we are practicing journalism in a time of rising expectations. People simply expect zero defects in the things they purchase and the things they rely on, indeed in the things they think and the people they think are competent...

"The problem isn't that we don't have enough subject expertise to know all the answers. The problem, indeed, is that we frequently aren't smart enough on many of the subjects we report about to ask the right questions.

"The case, I think, can be made on two fronts. First of all, we need to be smarter, we need to have subject expertise, because we simply cover many, many more subjects than we did just 10 or 20 years ago.

"When I came into a newsroom 25 years ago all the beats were buildings. ... City Hall, cops, courts, State House, Congress, Supreme Court... Now there are many, many more areas and more beats in the area of business, in the area of technology, in health care, in many complex areas of society, and in environment, in science, public finance, in lots of things that we don't normally think of as terribly complex, but where we need a subject expertise we didn't have before...

"The second piece of the case is that not only are there more subjects, but there are, of course, many, many more sources of information about these subjects. Therefore, our customers, our readers, our viewers, are much more knowledgeable themselves about different subjects and they have a much greater ability to assess our level of knowledge and therefore our competence. They can do it at their fingertips through the Internet.

"I'm often reminded of a headline that was frequently used around the turn of the century. It was a kicker to a headline and it said, 'Important if true'....editors used this when they weren't sure of the facts of a story. They could actually get by with it because their customers, their readers, understood that they didn't have all the sources to check information, and indeed, the readers had no other source. They had to rely on the newspaper. So they could report something and say 'important if true'. We can't do that any longer.

"We think of [subject expertise] mostly on the technical subjects, but it's not. The example I like best is the movies. Twenty years ago when I was a reporter if you were a paper big enough to have a movie critic, you could have guaranteed that that critic would have seen more movies than anybody in town. Then along came the VCR. Now everybody's a movie critic. ... So if you have a movie critic for a paper who isn't very knowledgeable, you're immediately going to recognize it. The same thing is true if you presume to write about home computers. In every market there are thousands, tens of thousands of people who are expert in this.

"When you think of papers, publications you respect most, in newspapers people tend to say the Wall Street Journal right off the bat, the New York Times, papers like that. In magazines, frequently it's magazines like Sports Illustrated. There's a reason publications like this are respected in the marketplace. It is because they come from a base of deep knowledge on subjects important to their audience. The key phrase there is on subjects important to their audience. ... There are subjects of particular importance to our audience, and I worry that we simply are not as smart as we need to be to hold our audience.

"The question to me isn't whether we need subject expertise. The question is, what are we going to do to get it."

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