Boyd to Launch Columbia J-School Experiment
Gerald Boyd has been chosen to experiment at the Columbia School of Journalism with a teaching method that is new to journalism schools but has been used in law, business and other professional programs, Columbia Journalism Dean Nicholas Lemann told Journal-isms today.
As Paul D. Colford reported in the New York Daily News, Boyd, who resigned as managing editor of The New York Times amid fallout from the Jayson Blair scandal, has been hired at the school to start this term in a newly created position of director of case studies.
“It’s trying to take the intellectual meat out of the top-level experience in the profession and bottle it, so that students have a feel for what goes on the top level of a profession,” Lemann said of the job, characterizing it as half-time.
Boyd would “develop three or four cases — teachable in a classroom. And then we’ll decide, and see what direction Gerald’s life is going in. There is no class sitting there ready to discuss it,” Lemann said.
As an example, one case might recreate the 4’o’clock news conference at a daily newspaper, he said.
The instructions aren’t very specific, Lemann said, because “I want Gerald to come up with things I haven’t thought of.”
Howard Husock, director of case programs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, was one of sources for the idea, Lemann said.
“What Nick is trying to do is to go beyond the who-what-why-where-when and basic Reporting 101 and prepare students for the more complicated tradeoffs both in reporting and management,” Husock told Journal-isms.
“Gerald Boyd would be a good choice because of the things he’s been through,” Husock said.
“We’d love a case about his own case at the Times,” he added, hastening to say that situations involving oneself make it difficult to be objective.
The case method is quite extensive, and is described on a Web site at the Kennedy School.
Lemann said that since he alerted the journalism faculty to his decision by e-mail Friday, he’s received six responses, three positive and three negative.
After an in-house committee reported last summer on what led to the Blair affair, which resulted in the resignations of both Boyd and Executive Editor Howell Raines, incoming editor Bill Keller wrote that “management has too often been peripheral and unpremeditated, and lately it seems to have fallen into a state of serious neglect.”
Boyd is also working on his memoirs, as reported in November. His editor, Dawn M. Davis at Amistad Books, said he was still in the research stage.
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