September 15, Share this article. Covering Indian Country. As one editor told him, being Native American meant he could not be objective in his reporting. In he moved back to the reservation to start a community newspaper called the Lakota Times.
At that time it was the only independently owned weekly Indian publication in the United States. In this collection of stories, Native Americans and non-natives who tell stories about the lives of Indian peoples talk about their obligation to fairness and the skills they need to live up to this responsibility.
It seems like a contradiction. From reality shows to video games, iPods to instant messaging, talk radio to MTV, they are practiced multitaskers. They surf the Web while listening to music downloads and cell phone their friends while thumbing e-mails on their BlackBerries.
Yet when it comes to journalism—to the news media—they know very little and are not as savvy about technology as we might think. What we offer is a journalism certificate, which is the rough equivalent of a minor without the academic discomfort it would cause to actually call it that. The students run the gamut. Some are liberal arts majors hell-bent on pursuing journalism careers.
Others are premed, prelaw, or engineering students who are simply curious about the media. On the contrary. Last semester, at the first class meeting, I gave students a questionnaire calculated to tell me what they know, so I could adjust my teaching accordingly. The good news here is that almost without exception, the students chose a nutritious diet of mainstream sources; they just preferred to get them on the Web.
