Educating better journalists

Malcolm Gladwell, in Time:

If you had a single piece of advice to offer young journalists, what would it be?

The issue is not writing. It's what you write about. One of my favorite columnists is Jonathan Weil, who writes for Bloomberg. He broke the Enron story, and he broke it because he's one of the very few mainstream journalists in America who really knows how to read a balance sheet. That means Jonathan Weil will always have a job, and will always be read, and will always have something interesting to say. He's unique. Most accountants don't write articles, and most journalists don't know anything about accounting. Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today, I would go get a master's in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that's the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.

I put the question to my colleagues: if you had the time and the money of going to grad school to get an advanced degree to help you with your writing, what would you study? Speaking for myself, an economics degree would probably be most helpful, but I struggle with economics because I don't have a natural facility with numbers. What I do love is history, and I would hope to get a greater grounding in modern history, especially cultural history, so I can better understand, interpret and explain current events in light of what's gone before. However, I doubt that solves the "role of the generalist" problem. On the other hand, as I see it, the two big, important areas that American journalists struggle to understand are religion and economics. Religion is something that interests me personally, professionally and intellectually, so perhaps studying religion and culture within a historical context would make me a better journalist. Then again, American news organizations generally don't care about religion news... .

Question to you readers: if you could send journalists back to school for advanced training, which areas would you have them study to improve their reporting? Obviously you can't have one reporter getting multiple advances degrees, so what I'm asking is which areas of expertise and thoroughness do you see journalists coming up short in today? I've said religion and economics, and to that I'll add science. How about you?

Yesterday, by the way, I found myself talking to a physician in another city who, when he found out I'm a journalist, said he'd stopped subscribing to his city's newspaper. He explained that he kept seeing in that paper and in other news media stories reported about his professional specialty, and situations he knew about personally, that got things significantly wrong. He saw this often enough that he finally lost confidence in the reporting about subjects about which he knew little.