A Decade of Coaching

Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism celebrates 10th anniversary

Rosaclaire Baisinger gets some of her best journalism education at a deli across the street from the San Francisco Chronicle office.

That's where she often meets her writing coach, Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson. Over sandwiches, they go over her class assignments, deconstructing ledes and honing nut graphs.

Johnson "was a pretty big help in Newswriting because I didn't know what I was doing at all," said Baisinger, 24. "It helped to have another pair of eyes to look at my stories."

Baisinger is one of 40 students enrolled this semester in the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism's writing coach program. This is CIIJ's 10th year of bringing students and professional journalists together.

Since its founding in 1990, the center has greatly expanded its services. It holds an annual job fair and a two-week summer program for high school journalists; it puts together the NewsWatch Project; and it trains high school teachers in teaching journalism.

But its mission remains the same: to integrate and improve not just journalism education at San Francisco State's but the entire profession.

Spreading the Coaching Gospel

A decade after the center started with two volunteer coaches (this semester it has 35 writing and photo coaches), it remains one of the few coordinated journalism mentoring programs in the country.

But that will soon change.

This spring, the center won a three-year, $525,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to export its coaching program to Fresno State University and four Bay Area community colleges.

Eva Martinez, director of the center, said the new grant will pay for a program manager and student staff who will help the five partner schools set up their own coaching programs. In the third year of the grant, the center will create a "how-to" manual on establishing a coaching program.

Why so much interest in coaching? Because it works.

A 1996 study showed that the writing and photo coach program helped students get through the rigorous program at SF State. "Students with coaches are more likely to stay in the class, and they're more likely to get that C+ or better, [which is necessary to advance to the next class]," Martinez said.

A non-profit organization, CIIJ is funded almost entirely by grants, except for its office and electricity, which are provided by the journalism department. Overall, CIIJ has raised about $8,509,497 over the past 10 years with donations from the Knight Foundation, the Freedom Forum, the Ford Foundation, the San Francisco Examiner, Pacific Gas and Electric, the San Jose Mercury News and other organizations.

The center operates on three levels: it works with professional journalists and journalists' organizations, it facilitates student support services, and it provides aid to high school and community college journalism programs.

"Ninety-nine percent of our services are free," Martinez said. The only thing CIIJ charges for is its training program for high school journalism teachers, which offers graduate school credit.

A Little History

When CIIJ was just beginning, former Chair Betty Medsger had trouble getting the first grant. "I soon learned that foundations want to give to places that have a track record as a stellar institution and/or as places that have received large grants in the past," she wrote a years ago in an informal history of CIIJ's beginnings.

Medsger pushed on, fueled by the disappointment of seeing minority journalism students fall through the cracks.

"I was amazed at what I saw - ethnic minority students entering and leaving the lower-division courses at a fast rate," she wrote. "To be fair, a lot of white people dropped through the cracks, but students of color were dropping through at a precipitous rate."

When funding finally came, a selection committee chose Jon Funabiki, a Pacific Rim affairs reporter for The San Diego Union, to be the center's director. CIIJ opened its doors on January 10, 1990.

Funabiki sympathized with the center's aims. In a 1990 interview he told Slug!,"I tried out for a job at one newspaper, but was not hired. Was it because I wasn't good enough? Or was it because of some hidden bias? I'm not sure. I do know this: At the time, the only Asian American on that newspaper's staff had been assigned to write obituaries for two years."

The Integration of Journalism

Ten years later, newsrooms still have a lot of catching up to do. According to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, ethnic minorities made up only 11.6 percent of newspaper employees in 1999.

With one of the most diverse student bodies in the United States, SFSU's journalism department aims to change that. Since CIIJ began in 1990, the percentage of minority journalism majors has risen from 30 percent to 50 percent, according to department records.

While CIIJ helps countless students each year, some don't realize they can take advantage of its services.

"I think students look at our name and think, 'Is it only for minorities?' " Martinez said.

CIIJ is for everyone. All journalism majors, she says, should be prepared to cover minority issues; using the right terms and being sensitive to diversity issues in journalism is as important as being accurate.

"What do you call me if I'm a Latina? " Martinez said. "What if it's a group of us? Do you use the word Hispanic? It's something, as a good journalist, you need to know."

CIIJ strives to answer questions like those, and to prepare students to be able to cover multicultural issues. As newsrooms gradually become more integrated, all journalists need to know how to handle diversity issues, Martinez said.

Watching the News

One of the ways CIIJ helps raise awareness of diversity issues in journalism is with its NewsWatch program. NewsWatch monitors media representations of minorities, and comments on them in its quarterly journal. www.newswatch.sfsu.edu.

Bobby Wilson, a 25-year-old journalism major, began working for the NewsWatch Project in March. His first story concentrated on the Gazette Newspaper Group in San Luis Obispo, which decided to pull an event of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) from its newspapers' event listings.

"Personally, it's raised my awareness of diversity," Wilson said of NewsWatch. "It's helping me think around people who have Different experiences, and they're giving me feedback about things they've seen in the news that make them uncomfortableŠ A lot of the time, it's upper-class white males that are represented in the paper."

Coaching Still the Primary Focus

While the center has developed many new activities over the years, its heart is still the coaching program. Professional journalists and photojournalists from around Northern California volunteer to meet with a student every week or two to discuss class assignments. Often these semester-long commitments turn into lasting relationships.

James Black, who graduated with a journalism degree in 1993, said his writing coach, Clarence Johnson of the San Francisco Chronicle, was "very instrumental" in his development as a journalist.

"Clarence offered a great deal of constructive criticism and continued to work with me on specific things until he saw some improvement," said Black, now an associate editor at NFL.com. "At that stage, someone who not only works on your skills but also your confidence is important. He worked very hard to find the time to work with me, and we still communicate with each other."

Jeremy Harness, 22, a transfer student from Diablo Valley College, is currently enrolled in the writing coach program. His coach, Jahana Berry of the Contra Costa Times, helps him rewrite his stories, usually about three times, before he turns them in. His Reporting class only allows one rewrite per story, so having a writing coach is important to Harness, who wants to be a sports writer.

Harness sees CIIJ as an important resource for him. Before the journalism job fair in November, the center helped him prepare his resume and clips for prospective employers and he often drops by just to shoot the breeze with the staff.

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