Dhyana Ziegler, Professor of Broadcasting at the University of Tennessee, and co-author of the Pauley Report which looked at the needs of journalism education in broadcast, reenforced Gene Roberts' remarks on continued learning and training:

"...As we look at this pyramid ... I would add that it should be wrapped in a bow of lifelong learning. It is a journey in developing and perfecting our skills. ... I think that that is sometimes difficult for us, that we don't, some of us don't think that we need to learn more...

"[As for] Visual competency... We need to learn something else besides just the video aspect as a broadcast journalist, but some of the on-line and the graphics and all of the other new technologies that are applied...

"I think that we have a major challenge as it relates to analysis and interpretation of stories. ...We must realize that it's going to take some research methods, it's going to take some understanding of other fields of discipline, and it's going to take a variety of subject matter in order for students to effectively engage in the kind of analysis and interpretation that we would like to bring out in a classroom discussion...

"Remember, [technology] is only a tool. Something that can be used, but we have to be creative in our approach and how we use that technology and how we apply it in the classroom...

"The area of cultural competence [is] where we fall short. In any intro to mass communication class you hear that the purpose is to inform the public, educate the public, persuade the public, and transmit culture. That has been very difficult, and I don't think that we strive to teach that, particularly in our news classes. As a person of color I live this every day, and I talk about diversity issues so that I can bring that to all of my courses -- not just in news."

Elizabeth Osder, content development editor at the New York Times Electronic Media Company, tries to teach her students how to recognize their strengths and weaknesses and use them effectively:

"When I read through the stuff you folks put together I found it very interesting and very thoughtful on a lot of it. And I'm not much of a word editor, that's not my background. But I heard what I do referred to so many ways in this package that I don't really know what I do when I got to the end of it. Is it the web, is it on-line, is it interactive, is it digital, is it electronic? We don't have a common vocabulary about what's going on in emerging technology and how it relates to news and information. One of the first things I do with my class is try to talk to them about analyzing web sites and thinking about them and trying to develop a critical vocabulary so we can understand and be thoughtful about what's going on out there. So often when I read the coverage in the news and I hear how people are talking about this medium, I'm really sort of saddened by the fact that we don't share any way of analyzing any sort of narrative form, any way of really talking about what's going on in an effective way in print and in broadcast. It's more sort of gee whiz, what's cool, what's hot -- not about what matters, what's relevant, what works and what doesn't work...

"But what it seems to me all about is knowing what you can do and what you can't do, and asking for help when you cant' get it done.

"What I try to teach this class of mine ... is what's going on out there in the digital world. Increasingly, we're approaching the 21st Century. The end of a millennium. Technology is a very important part of our lives. People don't really understand what's going on about technology. What's relevant about it? If these kids are going to be responsible journalists and serve communities then they'd better darn well understand sort of basic literacy about what's out there, how it works, basic concepts, so they can be credible reporters about technology and make it relevant to their communities...

"I do teach them the basics about sort of how to do this stuff because I think they will get better jobs and they will get opportunities because they do know those things.

"The last thing I try to make them aware of in these 12 weeks is what is their core competency? What is it that they do really well? What is it that they're passionate about? What is their strength and how they can best bring this to this new medium...

"I want to produce the people with the best skills into a new interactive product, news product. I want to work with the best photographers, the best writers, the best story tellers and work on sort of inventing this web journalism.

"...Narrative analysis. Those are the only two words that I think sort of sum up what I think people need to know... You can do narrative with more than words, and I think we need to understand that many different media come together to be able to tell stories. Then analysis. That you need to be able to, within analysis, think about ethics and culture in civic responsibilities...

"My message to educators, to newsroom professionals, to managers is this. You have got to look at the Scoops and you've got to keep them in the profession. You cannot let all of the new opportunity out there leach the talent from this industry. Those people who had energy, who had spirit, who were entrepreneurial, are going to other places... The farm team is changing. The product will change. And the good news and the good journalists and the people that you as managers want to shine light on are not going to be in the same places as they used to be."

A'Lelia Bundles, Deputy Bureau Chief at ABC News in Washington, says ABC News has taken several steps to try an offer mentoring to young journalists in their newsroom:

"A few weeks ago I had dinner with some college students -- none of whom were interested in journalism. They were interested in building web pages and being doctors and all kinds of other things. The topic of conversation, of course, went to the Clinton/Lewinsky/Starr story. These are intelligent kids. These are kids who are at Harvard, and they don't like what we do. They hate us. I found myself trying to tell them why this business was important to me 25 years ago, why when I was their age I wanted to do this, because I thought it was important and we had high standards. I found myself defending us. And that didn't feel right to me, that things have changed so much in 25 years... I don't know how much it has to do with managers, with not enough people who are trained to develop other people... Some of it is encouraging managers to know what to do with younger people who are coming along.

"One of the things that we do at ABC is work with some of our young people. This was an initiative that was important to me. It grew out of my concern about the development of our younger people, and I think maybe it grew initially out of a concern for looking at the diversity that we had in our upper level ranks that I didn't see enough women and enough minorities on what we call the fifth floor in New York. When I began to look at the organization it occurred to me this wasn't just about diversity of ethnicity or gender. It was about career development and how people are trained in our business, and this concept of management training is alien in most network news organizations. I think there are some newspapers and there are some broadcast groups who think this is very important, but it's like we don't really want to think we need to be trained so we push that concept away.

"In looking at trying to have upper level management more diverse by gender and by ethnicity, I look at what some of our flaws were in the organization as a whole. And as a result of that, we've begun to experiment with some things in the Washington Bureau -- the training of some of our younger employees.

"Every other Thursday we have what I sort of call a Journalism 101 class, but it's really pulling all of our desk assistants and production associates and interns together for breakfast ... and we draw on the resources of the people in our bureau. We get the headliners like Ted Koppel and Sam Donaldson who come and talk to our young people, but we also have the cameramen come, we have the editors come, we have people come and talk about their beats, but also what it takes to become good and to become successful-meaning what it takes to be good...

"We ask the people we invite to talk about the mistakes they made and how they overcame those mistakes. And it gives me a chance to hear what our young people are thinking about and it gives them a chance to have informal mentoring...

"In addition to that, we also try to do some work with our producers. We have a lot of producers 35-55 who have no upward mobility, so how do you keep those people interested? I agree with Gene that you have to encourage people to have outside opportunities, ongoing learning. It's something else that's alien to our culture.

"It's also important to have people realize that it's their responsibility to rejuvenate themselves.

"Finally, management training. Somebody mentioned Disney. That's a bad word for a lot of people. But actually within our organization I have drawn on some of Disney's expertise in terms of training managers, and they don't try to tell us what to do..."

Doron Levin, a business writer at the Detroit Free Press, believes that as the country's interest in economics and business has risen, journalists must become smarter in reporting it:

"Numbers and numeracy and quantitative analysis very much are part of the soft underbelly of journalism. I read stories about killer trucks being 47 times more likely to kill you than if you're in a passenger car and I stop and think I don't know what that means, and I'm not really sure the person who wrote that story knows what it means, but we need to know what it means before we can offer our readers content and material that they can process.

"...I discovered that over the course of my career these were subjects that became more and more and more important for a couple of reasons. One was the rise in interest among people of companies and careers and management and the market system. ... With the fall of the Iron Curtain and with the transformation of major overseas economies. I think people in this society are somewhat more reassured by the system we have and they don't necessarily think that because a person is trying to make it as an entrepreneur or because a person is a hard driving CEO that person is necessarily sleazy...

"How do we accomplish more competence in business and financial journalism?

"One way not to do it is to do what I saw at a lot of papers -- fortunately none of the ones I worked for -- which is to kind of steer reporters who don't fit in elsewhere into the business department to kind of pursue their career out of the way of the people doing the important work in the state house and this and that and the other...

"Another way not to do it, I think, is to endow chairs of business journalism here and there where you sort of spend a year or two or three or four collecting a million dollars and then give it to somebody in this chair and say okay, go teach business journalism.

"I'd like to see Poynter or some business school create a program of higher learning basically for graduates or maybe even mid-career journalists that would produce people who really understood how to cover markets, cover companies, who could come away knowing what a stock is, a bond is. The amount of just numeric incompetence in newsrooms is horrifying. I would match my paycheck next week against anybody's in this room if you could go to any newsroom and get more than 50 percent of the editors and reporters who could figure out a simple percentage increase... Now that has really drastic implications for our business, and it has to come to an end."

Betty Medsger an educator and author of the report, "Winds of Change," asserted that journalists must become shapers and controllers of journalism rather than victims of it:

"The first thing I'd like to do is to state what I think most of you will regard as a preposterous idea which I happen to think is too true, and it's this. When it comes to how journalists look at what they do and what their institutions do, journalists do not believe in education, and that they instead believe in magic.

"...I'm going to give you three quick pieces of my evidence. I'm sure that a lot of you have heard journalists say something like this when criticized about a story. "It's not our fault. We just cover what happens." Implying no perception of the fact that there might be 100 different ways to cover any one event or issue, rather than the one that was used.

"Another example, "We had to go with it because the Washington Post or Drudge went with it and forced our hand." You notice a helpless quality here.

"Or ... "You can't teach ethics. You have to just hire ethical people." As though ethics, we are born with ethics or we pick them up on the street at an early age, otherwise it's too bad.

"I think that this attitude on our part reveals underlying assumptions by journalists that individuals who practice journalism, no matter their level of competency, are inevitable victims of the overall processes of journalism, not shapers and controllers of those processes. I think maybe that says a lot about what is happening to the process and the sense that the process is out of control today, even when many of the participants, perhaps most of the participants in the process are very competent at each of the skills that we've seen listed here today...

"My dream of what a reform of journalism education and the relationship between journalism education and journalism would amount to would be that we would have the kind of collaboration ... that it would make it possible for the journalism profession to think at all times that out there in the academy are people who are experts -- some of whom are expert at the skills, the intellectual skills of the professional, and others of whom are expert scholars on journalism. And that they could assume that those people are thinking creatively and experimenting with materials that will help solve the problems of journalism, be looking at the history to give us insights from the past, and looking at current problems. That collaboration does not exist very much today.

"I'd like to suggest some specific steps that might be taken... [First] is for professionals to pay attention [to] the teaching of ethics. In our "Winds of Change"... we found that less than half of the journalism education programs in the country require the study of ethics.

"Be active rather than passive. If there's no relationship between a news organization and your regional education program or the one that you are attached to in some way, initiate contact. They probably would welcome your interest.

"Another area that I think the profession seldom looks at that I think could help us with our individual competencies and overall competency process in the profession, and that is encourage faculty research that is related to journalism. Phil Meyer is a wonderful example of that, and there are not that many such people.

"In our study we found out ... that in 60-some percent of the journalism education programs in this country, instead of people being on clear paths of research where they're contributing expertise and insights, that in fact confusion is the dominant word. People don't know what kind of research they want to do, what they should do, and they don't even have a sense that their research might be valuable...

"And two other things. This has been mentioned by a number of my colleagues up here, and it's so important. That is to create and support culture of continuing education. In my state, and I suspect maybe in all states, hairdressers take more courses than journalists do as a part of continuing education. ...We have not created either through education or through the profession, an environment that encourages people to grow intellectually. Yet we found in our studies that there is a deep hunger for this. People love their jobs but they felt they were sort of starved intellectually. Fifty-six percent of the new journalists we talked with even wanted to be required by their employers to take courses on a regular basis. And they weren't just talking about journalism training. They were talking about all kinds of courses..."

Audience Question: "One of the things I find lacking is we haven't discussed how money affects the news that we're receiving today. That is something I'd like to hear you people address."

Judy Woodruff: "I can tell you having worked at the News Hour for ten years that not once did one of the underwriters affect what we were doing. Now that's not to say that some conversation wasn't held behind closed doors somewhere, but I was never aware of it, and if I had thought that advertisers or underwriters in any instance were affecting the kind of coverage we were doing... It would have been a reason for me to think about leaving. That's just not the kind of place I want to work.

"Now are we all going to sit here and tell you that the fact that Archer Daniels Midland spends money on virtually every talk show in Washington probably doesn't have some affect, I have to believe that it must, but I can't put my finger on what it is. I never saw it at the News Hour in all the time that I was there."

A'Lelia Bundles: "Archer Daniels Midland is one of the sponsors of This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. Certainly we have had lots of conversation about it... But I remember during the political conventions, the presidential conventions, that we had people following the money stories. We covered our own lobbying reception and showed some of our contributors, and that made some of them mad, but our show still covered that. So we know there's a relationship between lobbying and the corporation, but we are able to cover that.

"In terms of the David Brinkley advertisements that were running on This Week, we as a news division made a decision not to carry those any more because we thought it blurred the distinction between news and advertising. So believe me, we are grappling with it. You are right to raise the question because I think there is a question in the public mind. I think our most recent response to it was try to keep those lines more clearly drawn."

Bill Buzenberg: "I do think, and I can address the Archer Daniels Midland issue a little bit, too, since they were also a funder for public radio. Any news organization worth its salt has established a clear firewall between where the money comes from and the work that it does as a news organization. It must do that. It's a big issue, and I think the larger questions you're addressing, asking about public service. I think what I'm seeing, just in this profession of ours, these companies are increasingly not news companies. They are not driven by news issues. They are not run by news people. They are, in fact, global entertainment companies and they have different agendas and they clearly have bottom line considerations. And news is a very different aspect in that larger corporation. It's going to take, I made the point about independence because I think that is so vital that journalists understand their independent role within whatever corporation and fight for that and create that firewall and maintain it because our credibility is being questioned all the time and will continue to do so."

Audience Question: "We prioritize these boxes by where they fit on a pyramid, but how would you prioritize them in terms of where we're falling down the most or where there's the greatest need for us as journalists to do better, think harder, think in new ways about developing competence? What are we lacking the most?"

Judy Woodruff: "I would say reporting. I think the most... It was one of the best written of the pages that I received, and I do think that we've got to get back to basics in this business. The newest, the oldest, the youngest, the most experienced, we all have got to work hard at the basics. I don't think we can ever take it for granted. I think we need to keep honing our skills in that area. I just think it's critical, and it's critical that we have editors and managers looking at our work closely all the time to keep us on our toes so that we never take it for granted."

Audience Question: "You asked which of the building blocks did we feel there's a weakness in. I would say one of the biggest weaknesses is in the cultural area. There's been a complete lack of competence and focus on the issue of diversity in this country.

"I recently returned from four or five years in Hong Kong where in the Asia Pacific region there are many economies and countries where there are four or five official languages, where three or four different cultures live together -- Singapore, Malaysia being examples of it. Because of the diversity, the economies are strong, the society is strong, and there is a lot going on that makes the country a wonderful place to live and work. You come home after five years, and all you see in American newspapers is "White kids leaving Tampa bar get beat up by blacks". "Immigration is a problem". "Latinos this", "People coming across the border". No one seems to be writing that diversity is a strength and that America is so intolerant. I cannot get over the ignorance that we have of other cultures, and that we totally ignore the contributions that other people can make."

Doron Levin: "I think one of his points is well taken. I think that at least from the perspective of my kids who are reaching late teens and early '20s, race is a lot less of a big deal than they're reading about in their newspaper. I think we spend way too much time emphasizing differences based on race and finding, dredging up every kind of outrageous event perhaps on an anecdotal basis and trying to make that a metaphor for a larger cultural divide, that I think just does not exist as much as it did when we were growing up."

Phil Meyer: "I want to accept Tom's challenge to prioritize. I also think I can get the number down. I haven't given up on that.

"The most important thing is discovering the truth, and these three are about that, so let's put them together and say we want to use the state of the art technology to discover the truth. As Alvah Chapman, my old boss used to say, we ought to farm as well as we know how.

"The second thing, truth isn't any good unless you can get it into people's heads, so these three go together because they're all about communicating the truth. Truth is not good if you can't communicate it.

"And it has to be communicated towards some purpose. That purpose is in service of society, and these two things go together and you can combine them into one. You can even call it civic or public journalism is one way of serving society.

"To coordinate all of that, you've got to have news judgment, and that's the province of editors and managers, so I'll keep them in a box by themselves.

"Last in priority, not because it's less important, is ethics, because without the others you don't have anything to be ethical about.

"So to put it all into a simple declarative sentence, what we need is to discover and impart the truth in service of society in a way that's well managed with a moral framework."

Roy Clark: "Wait just one minute. I protest. I don't want to be accused of being influenced by the Disney organization in the development of this new motto. But what I see here, I apologize to Peggy Stark for the color choice, is I see a level on the bottom level, I see a foundation of craft, and I see that expanding into a level of ideas, and I see it being sort of held up and inspired and inspirited by a group of virtues. All to fulfill our mission."

Jim Carey, Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism: "I will just try to add a thought or two, merely maybe with a sense of quickening the urgency, the felt urgency of our deliberations. Some of the things I say here are to people from the general public, that is who aren't part of the practice of journalism on a daily basis, but who are here with us.

"There have been mentioned on a few occasions as kind of the origins of this project, back in 1942 when the Commission on Freedom of the Press was created, it was created by Henry Luce and the owner of Time Life Magazine, and it's pretty much its sole entrepreneur, because he felt that not just the press, that the whole idea of freedom of the press was in crisis. To do it, he appointed a panel under the chairmanship of Robert Hutchins to carry out an investigation. The panel and the international advisory board included no journalists at all. Not a one.

"What the panel did was largely to take testimony and hold formal hearings and some interviews, and to commission some research reports on various topics. Then in 1957, 50 [sic] years ago, it issued its report, the report on a free and responsible press. It was greeted with derision by American newspapers in general, as in fact a threat to the press not an attempt to advance it.

"The reason why the Commission was appointed was that it was felt that freedom of the press was no longer endangered by government. That is the historic source of enmity to a free press. But by commerce. That is the growth of media organizations and the economic concentration of them constitute an independent threat that had to be dealt with. It was done, much of the work, during the war years, of course. An interlude in American domestic life, actually. And as I say, was issued in 1947 when the engines of domestic social change were starting up again.

"I can read a kind of summary paragraph. I went over to the Poynter library. "No democracy, certainly not American democracy, will indefinitely tolerate concentration of private power irresponsible and strong enough to thwart the aspirations of people. Eventually, government power will be used to break up private power or will be used to regulate it independent of what we think of freedom of the press."

"They went on from there to make a series of recommendations, many of which have been implemented in the mean time, I might add, on recommendations for government, for the press, and for the public to carry out.

"The situation has changed remarkably from that period of time, and in many ways for the better. Though, of course, in many ways it is different. It's the same in the sense we're going through another period of the rapid concentration of the agencies of communication now, more on a global than on a national scale. But I think it's different in one other way, and this is what gives this whole inquiry, to me, a sense of urgency.

"A free press, a strong presidency, an independent judiciary, a prudent congress are the basic fundamental institutions of a free way of life. They are precious. And when they are lost, the lessons of history are it is very, very hard to recover them.

"I believe on the evidence of my intuitions alone, that we have been engaged in a 30 year process now by which these institutions have been mutually degrading one another, and I take as my evidence for that the long term down turn in pubic opinion data. Not merely in the credibility of the press. If it was that, it might be a simple repair job. But in the credibility of all these institutions. The one that lagged was, of course, the judiciary, but its slide downward, because of recent events, is now accelerating. Journalism does not exist independently of the other institutions of a free society. It interacts with them. It supports them and develops them and it or they can mutually consume one another, degrade one another, until people come to the conclusion that none of them can be trusted. Not the President, not the congress, not the lawyers, and not the journalists.

"We are not living in an imaginative proximity to revolution. Not here. Americans love change, but they hate revolution. It's just the opposite of the French. The French love revolution, they talk about it all the time, but they hate change. They won't change anything. (Laughter) We're not in a proximity to revolution. But there is an alternative. An alternative bad for all of us, and that alternative is the withdrawal from public life into gated communities, in private compounds, into the indifference of wealth, into the psychological removal of the conditions of citizenship. That, I believe, is much more widespread as a means of handling the progressive degradation of these institutions.

"Of course when that happens, the real losers are not those who can send their children to private schools, keep Swiss bank accounts, have offshore retreats to which they can go when life gets uncomfortable. It is the poor and disadvantaged or the least advantaged.

"A great Latin American economists calls nations the "skin of the poor". Only the institutions of strong nations protect people who are disadvantaged.

"This committee made a very wise decision relative, I believe, to the one that was made with the Hutchins Commission. It said the Hutchins Commission was undertaken by people who were not journalists, who were not involved in it. It had the air of a certain group of wise men -- and they were all men -- coming together to prescribe for others. Now whatever is going to change, whatever is going to improve, has to come up from within us, from our understandings developed by a conversation with the public about what the problems are and how we might go about improving them...

"We've tried for many years with limited success to deal with these problems in stock markets. With the introduction of the telephone to the New York Stock Exchange -- I laugh because the example comes from nowhere. It very much destabilized stock trading in the United States. It made it too instantaneous. The market started to spin wildly out of control. So they passed a rule -- no telephones on the floor of the stock exchange. They put a one minute time lag between the telephone call and a transaction. Simply gaining that amount of time was enough to stabilize the activity. We're going to have to think of some very, very practical ways to arrest some of the problems that are destabilizing the craft and leading to the kinds of effects which we dearly want to avoid.

"One final thought. But is the problem which the Commission on Freedom of the Press identified -- the economic problem, the problem of concentration in irresponsible power. Is that with us? We can debate this. I think there's more of a problem. I think we should make more use of the anti-trust laws, a number of things. But I want to raise it in a slightly different context.

"The people who designed these institutions believed that a democratic and free way of life would produce the best way of social living and the best road to prosperity. There are experiments going on, as we know in the world, to prove the reverse. That you can have economic prosperity without democratic institutions or free ways of life.

"People from all over the world, from the countries in Eastern Europe, all over Asia, are not studying the China miracle for nothing. They're studying ways in which you can combine international and global economic opportunities and expanding markets with the maintenance of authoritarian ways of life. I will not read you speeches from Rupert Murdoch as he praises this development in places like Singapore, but he makes them regularly.

"So there is an experiment underway to see if the terms of economics and democracy can be inverted. Maybe a free press is not necessary to an economically prosperous country. Maybe it isn't. What will people choose then? What we do about the quality of journalism will affect that choice if that is the choice that we come to. So the competence of journalists and of the press has its final payoff in the regulation and enhancement of the fundamentals of our way of life and all our political institutions.

"[The Committee has] taken on a large task, but at least the sense now that it's our problem -- it's not just theirs or someone else's. It's ours. If something is going to be done about it, as difficult as it is, we will have to do some things about it. That, I hope, is one of the lessons of today about competence. I hope it's a lesson that the committee teaches at large. And I finally hope when we get to those final recommendations, those we make will actually deal with some of the issues that so vex us."

Tom Rosenstiel: "I wanted to take just a minute to sort of summarize part of what happened today.

"First of all, we had the work of Poynter in laying out the element of competency. Then we had our panel of responders come and not detract, I think, but add. We saw the second row become one competence, perhaps, a group of technical competencies. I think we saw in some ways the civic competency expanded to include a bullshit detector, or maybe a truth detector. To include civic knowledge, but to go beyond that, to include street smarts and a sense of history and where the bodies are buried in the town. Maybe we should call this real worldism.

'I think we saw ethics expanded to include the capacity for sympathy, the capacity for hope, for modesty. I think we heard respect for the public. Maybe we should call this character. And I think, importantly, we added a competency. I'd stick it way up [top] ... and we'll call that a sense of calling. That's where the passion is, where the sense of democracy is. Where Jay's love belongs.

"...I think we had a sense that the need or the weakness is interrelated. That a failure of news judgment is a failure of character, and that failure leads to a weakness in the sense of calling. That we get lost in the technology. That we're gaining technical expertise, but we're losing the sense of balance between some of these others. And that interconnected with all of this is a cultural literacy. We define it too narrowly. It's more than skin deep. It starts there, but it's intellectual diversity, and that may be in some ways part of the interconnection of all of them."

Thus, the new pyramid might look like this: