DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

Recently I wrote a long analytical piece on Nevada's higher education chancellor, Jim Rogers. Before writing I did a bunch of interviews and before interviewing I read everything I could find on Rogers and campus issues in the last few years.

This was more of a pleasure than I expected in this era of shallow journalism. There wasn't much on any television web sites or in the Reno Gazette Journal, but the Las Vegas dailies were great. The Sun's Christina Littlefield and the Review Journal's Lawrence Mower have written innumerable reports on higher education that were informed, interesting, perceptive and packed with facts. They were a pleasure to read.

It appeared that these two reporters are given enough latitude and time to actually work the beat, or at least spend a lot of their time on the beat. This is becoming less and less common in journalism. Beat coverage is no longer chic among editors and managers. Instead, they want general assignment reporters who can cover street repairs one day, the school board the next, and nuclear waste the third. Naturally, this produces journalism in which reporters never develop any depth of knowledge. I wonder if people realize how rare it is anymore to find serious reporting?

The Mower and Littlefield reports I found provided context, scrutinized official and other claims, and supplied the readers with information they could get nowhere else. From a proposal to ban rap music from campus to energy research to tuition levels, the two reporters have done some fine work. Littlefield once wrote a 1,063-word profile (not counting a sidebar) of a new campus president by going to the last campus where he worked in California. Not many news entities in markets the size of Las Vegas will pony up the money for road trips anymore.

The analysis the two reporters provide of public policy involving higher education is especially important because so many people in the university system, and this includes the regents, are unwilling to level with the public about what they really think, particularly where Rogers or his agenda are concerned. As a consequence, programs and policy do not get the level of public scrutiny they should, with the result that a lot of uncooked initiatives get approved. Frequently Littlefield and Moyer are the only ones subjecting important proposals to serious examination outside the campuses.

Unfortunately, there is one thing that is reducing the amount of coverage these reporters can give to higher education issues. In fact, while higher education is still getting the same amount of Nevada ink and air, I think coverage of higher education ISSUES is down. That's because Rogers' management style sucks a lot of the oxygen out of the journalism atmosphere. Any media entity is only going to run a certain number of stories about higher education. When a large proportion of them are about personalities, that means that a large proportion of them are not about new campus construction or public/private partnerships in higher education.

Rogers' foibles drive out more important news coverage of higher education. The R/J in June published Mower's 729-word report on a regents meeting. It was entirely about friction between Rogers and the regents and a recommendation for conflict mediation. Littlefield once devoted a 1,855-word story to the way Rogers forced UNLV President Carol Harter out and 1,238 on the view of management experts and anger specialists of Rogers' administrative style. They were essential stories, but they took space from more important stories.

Who knows how many words were devoted to Rogers' January threat to resign, followed by his resignation, followed by his withdrawal of his resignation?

That is column space that did not go to curriculum, admissions standards, minority enrollment, or even Rogers' pet health sciences project. And it was space that did not make the best use of the talents of two terrific reporters.