"Integrating the Student Magazine into the Journalism and Advertising 
Curriculum"

By David Abrahamson
Nothwestern University

AEJMC, Chicago, IL 8/1/97 



I thought it might be interesting to turn the idea around and instead talk 
about integrating the journalism and advertising curriculum into the student 
magazine project. At Medill, as I know it is at a lot of schools, we are 
comfortable with the professional assumption of our student's motivation. That 
is to say, they come to journalism school to learn a profession and become 
active and hopefully successful members of that profession. And as a result of 
that, it is quite easy to become comfortable with the idea that in many, many 
cases the more that we can structure our educational efforts so that the 
students will learn by doing, the better we will be. Having the experience of 
actually doing the work under the guidance, under the advisement, with 
direction, with support, with encouragement, with the resources provided by 
the educational institution. That is clearly the underpinning logic of the 
Medill program. 

What is interesting about that, and one has to keep reminding oneself, is that 
even though the students are doing (the project), the product that they 
produce is not terribly important. Let me say that again. The product that 
they produce is not really that important. We are very proud of it. We hope it 
will win awards. It serves many, many functions. But what is far more 
important than the product that is produced, is the process the students go 
through to produce it. 
	
Sarah described that first crazy week where the four groups come up with their 
concepts. Let me put just a little sharper point on that. They show up the 
first day. A day that is not even the first day of the quarter. They are 
required to come one day earlier. Medill, for some historic reason, starts on 
Tuesdays. Magazine students come back one day early. Monday morning they show 
up and they have a seminar or two to sort of get started. By midday Tuesday 
each of those four teams have to have four relatively viable magazine ideas. 
which they are then challenged by faculty members and by fellow students. By 
midday Wednesday they have to winnow those four down to one idea. By midday 
Thursday they have to start work on a presentation of their idea of 25 or 30 
minutes, which they will give starting at eight o'clock on Friday morning, all 
this in the very first week of the quarter. 

Trying to convince their fellow students of not only of the sexiness of the 
idea and how much fun it will be to write these wonderful stories and research 
these ideas, but also of the business viability of their idea. That there 
actually is a reader universe out there. That there is actually an advertising 
universe out there. And to prove that as much as they can on the basis of an 
awful lot of work done awfully quickly. At the conclusion of which by 11:00 on 
that Friday the faculty then leaves the room and the joke is we wait for the 
puff of white smoke. The students then decide. Some classes can do it in 45 
minutes. Some classes go until dark of that Friday. Sarah's class was fairly 
expeditious. You had it decided by 3:00. 

And it's really funny, the students always ask us, "Well, how do we decide? Do 
we eliminate two first?" And we have a wonderful pat answer which is always 
that we have no idea. I've never been in the room when it has happened. You 
can see the implications of student empowerment. But you also can see how much 
work they have to do in a very, very short period of time. What always amazes 
me, and is something, this idea of process rather than product, is I sit at 
that meeting on Friday morning where each team presents its idea and then gets 
challenged. And most of the challenging, three-quarters or more of the 
challenging, kind of poking holes, trying to find weaknesses in the idea, is 
not done by the faculty who is just sitting on the outside of the room. It is 
done by the students themselves. And the quality of their questions, the 
insights into the weaknesses and the strength of ideas is just astounding. 
Every Friday at the end of week one, I am sort of transported with a big grin 
on my face. Imagine that students have, in effect, taught themselves this. We 
didn't teach them. They sort of were shown where the pool was, the ladder was 
taken out, and they all dove in. It is this process of teaching themselves, of 
doing it themselves, that I think somewhere deep in the brain that actually 
makes education take place. 
	
That said however, for magazine students certainly at Medill, the magazine 
publishing project, which is established to be the capstone course depending 
on when the student enrolled (we have rolling admissions), sometimes it is 
not. In Sarah's case is was not. Roughly, almost all, ninety percent of the 
students that graduate in December, graduate after the project and go off and 
get jobs. About half of the students that take the project in the spring have 
a summer quarter afterward. It is a mixed blessing. It would be nice to finish 
with the project and be rocking at the top of the stairs. Some students tell 
us, Sarah's opinion is completely valid of course, but some students tell us 
it is nice to have a decompression quarter after the project because they 
worked so hard. The project dominates the life of the student for their entire 
four quarters even though we only experience them in one of them. It is indeed 
the ten-pound tail wagging the one-pound dog. It is far too demanding on the 
students. Did you catch the language of Sarah? I recorded three times at 
least, maybe four, where she said, "Went through." What we went through. And 
she is being kind. She is being very kind. No, but it is far too demanding. 

There is a dedicated room. Many schools have dedicated rooms. I don't know 
many schools have graduate students, admitted it is the only course they are 
taking that quarter, I don't know how many schools have students that would. 
Probably the median amount of time that they spend in the room... the median 
amount of time is probably 10 or 11 hours five and a half days a week. Some 
put in spurts. Some put in 16 and 17 hours seven days a week depending on 
where we are in the project. Every quarter there are students that sleep in 
the room. It is terribly difficult to let the students off early. We try to 
reward, half a dozen times we try to say, "You've done a great job, everybody 
go home. It is 3:00 and we are ending the business day at 3:00." You come in 
at 5:00 and three-quarters of them are still in the room. Remember it is their 
project, not ours. The level of commitment is there. We have found that the 
only way we can actually reward them, and the director often regards his job 
not teaching anything, but trying to keep 18 really hard-working students 
somewhat sane during the quarter. The only way we can reward them with time 
off is to say that...we can't do it in the afternoon, we have to do it in the 
morning. The day is going to start at 10:30 a.m. tomorrow. When we do that, at 
least half don't come in early. 
	
That said, in addition to being really hard on them, we have to admit it is 
really hard on the faculty. There is a dream in the Medill faculty, magazine 
faculty, that somewhere there is a course where you show up twice a week, give 
a lecture, have some office hours, grade some papers a couple times during the 
semester, have a couple days off to go write your book. Obviously that is not 
the magazine publishing project. It is very, very intense. It is demanding on 
faculty too. Not as demanding as it is on the students by any means. In one 
sense, we have the advantage of it not having it be some single experience in 
our lives. We go through it numbers of times. But the cost in terms of going 
out at the faculty level is something from a managerial point of view, that 
has to be taken into account also. 

 Question: What is it that you do?

DA: Imagine, that your job, you have eleven weeks, not fifty weeks, eleven 
weeks to start a magazine. And you are given 18 novices of varying degrees of 
backgrounds. You have a lot of resources, a lot of extra consultants that come 
in and help you and explain specific areas. But the job of the full-time 
faculty is to serve as the board of directors and advisors and counselors. And 
we are there eight, or nine or ten hours a day, five days a week. Make 
ourselves available for students. The faculty works in shifts. One faculty 
will come in at eight o'clock and leave at five. Some will come in at ten and 
stay late working if the students are having a problem at six o'clock and say 
oh my god, how do we do this? It is not unusual to have faculty stay until 
8:00 or 9:00, two or three days a week. We are serving two functions. 

One is, roughly, on average, maybe once a day, twice a day, certainly in the 
earlier part of the quarter, we are conducting seminars. We are teaching 
content. The rest of the time we are advisors, counselors, problem solvers. 
Both in terms of their idea itself shaping and the abstract sort of notion. 
But also the very kind of detailed questions like, "How do I find out what 
kind of mailing list to buy?" Well, there is the book. There is the phone. Who 
do I call to get the scans done? Here's the phone number of the people three 
blocks down the street. The actual guts of producing the actual product. 
Conducting that sort of stuff takes a lot of time, just the getting the stuff 
done. 

Question: Do you read everything?

DA: Yes, I give final approval. 

Question: Do you ever look at anything and say, oh no way?

 It depends on the faculty member. As director, the normal course would be to 
read things twice. Once in the first turn in. Once after second edit. And then 
scanning the final prototype. The editorial instructor, which is a separate 
position, reads things at all four points. 


For example, as the director of the project, we hold it in the fall and in the 
spring, winter quarters a separate quarter, the summer quarter is a separate 
quarter, the director directs it twice in a row. Two on, one off. I'm not 
going to direct it in the fall. It is very strange. When I first came to 
Northwestern, I said, "No, no, no I love it. I want to make it mine." And the 
deans kind of nodded and said, "Oh sure, David, if you'll like to do it. That 
would be fine." And by the end of the second project I was just this complete 
basket case. I hope I know how to pace myself a little better now.

 
That said, there are some unusual topics. And this is the heart of my 
presentation. If one makes a commitment to a fully realized publishing 
program, you get an opportunity to have students learn things that they would 
otherwise never learn. This way is a crazy way to do it; it is a really 
expensive way to do it. But it is also a really wonderful way to do it. It is 
wonderful on a lot of levels. Here are some of the ways that might not 
automatically come to mind. Immersion in the project allows the students to 
learn not just management skills, that sounds cold, kind of deracinated to 
learn, to learn 
real leadership skills. 

They are all poured into this cauldron together, but there is a hierarchy. 
There are department heads. There is an editor, there's a managing editor, 
there is an advertising director and advertising associates. And if you 
believe that, in some way, stress reveals character. Or that stress provides 
an opportunity for character to be built. And to learn how to set examples. 
And to learn how to find the keys to other people and help them do their best 
work. If you believe stressful situations, and you may not believe this, but 
if you do believe that stressful situations are ways to do that, provided that 
your resources are viable, certainly the project qualifies as that. Secondly, 
and sort of a part of that, it really provides an opportunity for the students 
to practice team-building skills. There is no profession more pathologically 
collaborative than magazine-making. 

Everybody has to talk to everybody all the time. More than you ever want to. 
Not just within the editorial and design department, which is of course a 
matter of record, but also the advertising people. The fact that you are 
starting a magazine, wouldn't the advertising people have to talk to the 
editorial people? To do that effectively, in a way that takes advantage of the 
empowerment that the students are given. Remember that they are incredibly 
empowered at least on one level. And puts them in a position of using teamwork 
to solve problems. 

The point was made by one of my colleagues, I think Alan, about how 
individualistic journalism is and it attracts individualistic personalities. 
This in effect subverts that individualistic ideal. And says no, to be a 
successful magazine professional, you may not like to be part of a team but 
you are going to learn how to do it. 
Or at least learn how to pretend to do it and like it. And I think that is 
really important for long-term success. 
	
Another thing that is interesting doing it this way, it really allows the 
students, because it is their magazine and they care so much about it, to 
really develop their own ideas about the aesthetics, if you will, of the long 
form of writing. It is not just go do another feature piece for a magazine or 
newspaper class. But they really care about the voice of the piece and the 
shape of the piece. And how this piece sort of fits in or supports the 
personality of their magazine that they are trying to create. Those are pretty 
sophisticated, subtle, nuance judgments. That you can really learn by doing. 
They care about it. Sarah was a part of editorial staff which is one of the 
plum jobs. And the amount of effort and sweat and toil and blood and argument 
and compromise that went into shaping language, shaping meaning, is made 
possible with this kind of course. 
	
Another aspect is, it seems commonplace, but what happens after the reporting 
and writing process. We really want our students to know how to report, we 
really want our students to know how to write, but there is that whole other 
realm of matters. Whether it is production considerations. Whether it is 
business considerations or maybe it is design considerations that doing a 
prototype class will allow the students to experience. 
	
Which leads to another terribly important point, and that is in magazine work, 
except at a few rarefied, wonderful places I would love to work, it really 
developes a clear reader-orientation. It underscores the importance of a 
reader-orientation for the students. They have to come to terms with the 
market forces. Remember the external validation, the viability argument? We 
don't say, "What do you like? What do you think?" We say to the students, and 
they say to us, they present us with external evidence of why something would 
be successful. They do a circulation test and the numbers that come back from 
the circulation test are what go into the business plan. They do a media kit 
and they do a simulated ad sales campaign. And it is those ad sales results 
that are extrapolated into the business plan. And so when you come up with an 
idea for a story, Sarah's class labored for more than 24 hours in trying to 
select which of the dozen features will go into their final prototype which is 
limited in size. And it was a wonderful conversation where they were arguing, 
they got down to four or five different niches and which was best and why. As 
an onlooker, a faculty member, I had no brief of which one got in and which 
ones didn't get in, but I was absolutely in awe of the kind of judgments they 
were making. The kind of sincerity of judgments they were making related not 
to what they liked, not to what they had written. It is however a point of 
leadership that the editor-in-chief eliminated her piece very early in the 
process. And I am not saying it was a good or bad decision but it was good act 
of leadership. She made the sacrifice.

 But ultimately they were deciding what was best for the reader. I think part 
of that is also coming to terms with the fact that we all have to live with, 
certainly our students have to live with, and that is the whole new role of an 
editor, of an editorial worker or an editor-in-chief in the magazine 
profession. The days of church and state and Chinese wall and all that are 
long gone. It doesn't mean that editors have to disserve the readers. It 
doesn't mean that they have to sell advertising. It doesn't mean that they 
have to lose integrity. But it does mean that they have to represent their 
magazine to more than just one constituency and ultimately they will be held 
responsible for the business success or failure of their publication. Kurt 
Anderson got fired from New York magazine for a bunch of reasons including the 
fact that circulation wasn't where they wanted it to be. And so some knowledge 
of the circulation side, some knowledge of the advertising side, is something 
people have to contend with. 
	
And two last points in closing. The question of having a prototype course or a 
full publishing course, and now I'm sort of undermining what I said before. 
Given all that effort, all that energy, all that toil, sweat and tears, it 
does produce a product that is an absolute killer adjunct to a job interview. 
The students go out with something, not only that they are proud of, 
recognized that their whole heart and soul is in. And if you think that 
getting hired on a magazine as an entry level, or an entry-level plus one or 
two staffer is a function of the commitment you can display to the profession, 
if you believe the world rewards enthusiasm, if you are holding something that 
you died for in your hand and that is part of the package that you go on your 
job interview with, evidence shows us that it really seems to make a 
difference. And one last closing point to underscore something Alan said 
earlier. I've been speaking about now sort of what the students "went 
through." And I made a reference that faculty "go through" it too. 

From the faculty point of view, the most wonderful thing about it of all is 
that all these items that I just listed are something that every faculty 
member gets to learn anew each time themselves. I've been involved in six 
projects now and there has never been a project that some major portion of 
what I presume to be my understanding of the magazine profession, wasn't 
seriously revisited during the course of the project by what the students, 
perhaps not knowingly, have led me to learn or taught me. And it makes it an 
exhaustive exercise and an incredibly rewarding program to be involved with. 



Copyright 1997 David Abrahamson. All rights reserved.