"If we don't teach the skills, journalism dies, and then we're really in trouble, politically and democratically," investigative journalist Nick Davies told the Association for Journalism Education (AJE) at its annual conference last Friday.
Davies is a divisive figure in journalism circles for what he calls the 'dog eat dog' attack in his recent release Flat Earth News on the profession he's worked in for more than 30 years.
The book details the commercialisation of the media industry and the managerial-led decline of newsrooms into 'ghastly news factories'. Cuts in staff and the tripling of pages have grown profit margins at the expense of news quality, and PR has filled the gap, the book says.
While writing Davies drew on research that suggested journalists spend an average of eight minutes checking up to 10 stories per shift, with almost no time for 'finding out the truth'.
Flat Earth News has 10 chapters. Yet Davies' focus at the AJE conference was on the book's 11th Chapter - the one he has researched, but is yet to write, and which would address the question, asked by many educators in the audience, of what can be done about this.
For Davies, journalism is at a pivotal moment, where educators can protect skills that journalism needs but proprietors don't want: investigation, fact-checking, truth telling.
But there are two threats to this: the first is commercialisation of the media which, as Davies told the audience, has left it 'structurally right to produce falsehood and propaganda'; the second lies within the commercialisation of education itself.
Some college and university journalism courses are a disaster, run as income generators and taught by people with no journalism skills, he argued.
Rob Campbell, senior journalism lecturer from the University of Glamorgan, was quick to counter, pointing out that there was 'a thousand years of journalism experience' in the room, and that Davies was confusing journalism with media studies.
Yet while I now work at an institution accredited by National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) [University of Sunderland] with experienced journalists as educators, previously when I taught on a course sold as a practical journalism degree for a different institution I was the only (part-time) member of staff with any industry experience.
Davies argued that even 'good' schools are destroying journalism by teaching three misplaced rules: read the papers, be objective, and report in balanced way.
Reading the papers only means students ingest the bad habits of 'churnalism', he said.
Furthermore, according to Davies, objectivity is a myth and all journalism suffers from narrow selection of stories, as well as manipulation by PR; while providing balance means never saying anything.
These should be put aside and a new focus on 'honesty', as well as the skills to check, double check, and check again, should be introduced.
But where does this leave journalism education – between the rock of media corporatisation and the hard place of digging for the truth?
It is a question that online journalism educator Paul Bradshaw from Birmingham City University has raised, and a point picked up by AJE members: stories were shared of journalism students sent out to work placements with investigative skills, only for them to come back with the message that those skills weren’t needed.
As Deirdre O'Neill, associate principal lecturer in media at Leeds Trinity, said, for the newspaper groups it's a case of 'never mind the quality, feel the width'.
So can we educators be the guardians of skills that the industry, and often students, see no use for? Davies, jetlagged from his recent flight from Australia promoting his book, was not optimistic.
To research the unwritten chapter he put in Freedom of Information requests to journalism schools for the student feedback they had received. The resistance, he said, was shocking: one university claimed the documentation was 'Commercial in Confidence' on the basis that the comments were so bad they would damage its business if they came out.
Many delegates agreed with the depressing picture of the decline of journalism investment and a lack of time and interest to report the 'truth', especially at a local level, but said educators are both adapting to industry realities and staying true to the core values of journalism.
A new Centre for the Freedom of the Media at Sheffield, launched at the conference, was just one example raised, and for Mick Temple, professor of journalism and politics at Staffordshire University and new AJE chair, there is now an opportunity for the AJE to push back against the decline.
"We not only need to respond to current debates we must also help set the agenda," he said.
Almost lost within this discussion was a significant point from Samantha Lay at Leeds Trinity: her research into the work of the government’s media convergence think tank suggested that journalism, and journalism educators, have had almost no representation in the discussions shaping media in the 21st century.
If journalism educators are to fulfil the role that Davies sees as essential for saving the industry, then they, and the AJE, must step up another level to, in Mick Temple's words, 'play a more dynamic role in the future of journalism education and research in British universities. It's time for the AJE's voice to be heard.'
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