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HOLLAND
COLLEGE • March 2003
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INSIDE |
THE
INSTRUCTORS
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| Journalism
best learned on-the-job: Holman Program's first instructor reflects on course, profession By Dan Benoit Class of '03 The Holland College journalism program is a lot different than it used to be, 
says the program's first instructor. Alan Holman, 62, was the first instructor of the newly formed program 30 years ago. "I only lasted two years…and gleefully got out of there and went and started my own little weekly newspaper,"he said. Holman's paper, the Countyline Courier, based in Kensington, only lasted a year. Holman got into journalism by accident, he said. "I started at the Guardian, just off the street, looking for a job. [It was] 1964, the first of P.E.I.'s three centennial years, and I went in January thinking they might be needing some extra help being a centennial year and all,"he said. His desire to work in journalism started a couple of years before, working in the ad department of the Winnipeg Free Press. "I just didn't know what I wanted to do with my life at that point and I was looking around for something to do and I remembered the guys in the newsroom seemed to have a pretty good deal going. All they did was go around and sit around a bunch of meetings and come back and write the story,"he said. "I never really looked at it as a career. I was just looking for a job. I was just looking for something to do. And then it turned out it was a pretty good fit,"he said. Journalism is changing now, he said. "I see it in a lot of ways. In my day there was all kinds of characters around in the business. Now, the people I see coming in the business now are pretty straight,"he said. Every paper had characters, he said. "Every paper I went, there was always what I would call characters. And a lot of them were really, really good reporters that couldn't have held a job in any other kind of organization,"he said. Though the business side of things may be different, instructors face the same difficulties today teaching journalism as he faced 30 years ago, he said. "An instructor can only teach some of the basic skills. The talent has to be within the person,"he said. "There are people who can help them through some of the basics, but what'll separate them from the crowd…,"he said, shrugging his shoulders. While not entirely frowning on journalism schools, Holman believes journalism is something people have to learn on-the-job, he said. "If you've got a blatant, basic curiosity about things and you get working with a half decent editor...you can learn in about three months on the job,"he said. There was a time when someone off the street could get a reporting job, he said. "It's changed now. Now they want a degree or they want a college or something. Papers have gotten lazy. They let the journalism schools do their initial hiring for them,"he said. The early days of the program ruffled some feathers with local newspaperman, he said. "Jim MacNeill was running the Graphic at the time. He was sort of leery about the idea of training journalists in colleges but was at least doing some on-the-job training and coming in and talking about his paper. He wasn't close-minded about it,"he said. After working for newspapers all over the country and 14 years with the CBC, Holman decided it was time to leave the business in 1993, he said. "It seemed like an optimum time to get out," he said. Meeting editors' increasing demands biggest challenge: MacLean says By Dan Benoit Class of '03 The Journalism program's newest instructor says he's learned as much about the news business by teaching it as his students do. While Rick MacLean may be relatively new to teaching the news business, the 45-year-old Miramichi, N.B. native earned an MA in Journalism at the University of Western Ontario in 1984, then edited the Miramichi Leader for 14 years. When MacLean saw an ad for the job in the Telegraph-Journal in 2000, he turned to teaching as a change from the grind of running the twice-weekly newsroom in northern New Brunswick. Teaching journalism has taught him a lot about the business, he said. "You have to break skills into tiny little pieces that can be taught. It's not enough to say ‘Well, go write a magazine length story," he said. "I'd done that before I came. I knew how to do it. But that's not teaching anyone anything. You actually have to break things into the smallest possible pieces that you can and teach all of those pieces, so the student can then turn around and build them all up like Lego blocks," he said. Newspapers are generally more demanding of their junior reporters today than in previous years, he said. "Editors don't have the amount of time they used to have to be teachers. "They're busy putting their newspapers out. So they want someone who's going to make their job easier." The program tries to meet the expectations of editors, he said. "The key for us is that we try to match up to the industry as closely as we possibly can, right down to the kind of digital cameras we buy, the kind of software we use," he said. "Digital photography has changed some of the ways we run this program. It's made it much easier to teach photography because we get instantaneous gratification," he said. And although the Internet has made it easier to teach students how to find background, the validity of the information is sometimes suspect, he said. "You don't know until you actually start to pick up the phone and start to call how solid some of that information is." Editors seem to like the training the program provides, he said. "We've had students go into a daily newsroom and the editor said ‘I'll have someone teach you how to use the computer," and the guy said, ‘Well, that's an i-Mac and we use that every day, let me check,' and flipped through the whole thing. The training session lasted all of five seconds," he said. "Students are able to sit down and go right to work. And that was mentioned by the editor, who was extremely pleased he didn't have to sit down and teach someone how to use a Mac." MacLean has enjoyed his career as a journalist, he said. "There's no business quite like a one where people would invite you into their homes, tell you their stories and then insist that you stay for a cup of tea. And I don't even drink tea." But teaching is fun as well, he said. Not long after starting as an instructor, MacLean got a call from former instructor Don Cayo, now the editorial page editor with the Vancouver Sun. "Cayo called me up early on and told me, ‘One thing you'll realize early on is you really like these people.' And he's exactly right. These people are fun to be around. Frustrating at times, but they're just fun to be around." |
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