Andie Tucher, a historian and journalist, is an assistant professor and the director of the Communications PhD program at Columbia University. Her book Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America's First Mass Medium (UNC 1994) won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. Tucher is currently finishing her second book, which explores the intersections of history, memory, and storytelling in one family's 400-year-long American experience.

Before coming to Columbia, Tucher served as a speechwriter for Clinton/Gore '92. She was an editorial associate to Bill Moyers at Public Affairs Television, and edited his book World of Ideas II (1990). She also served as an editorial producer of the historical documentary series The Twentieth Century at ABC News and an associate editor of Columbia Journalism Review.

Tucher graduated from Princeton as a Classics major, earned her M.S. from the Columbia University School of Library Service, and holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University.

Selections from interview with Sarah Hart in April, 2008:

Why do you teach journalism?

My role in this program is a little strange. Columbia is largely an MS program where students come to get intensive training on how to do journalism, but when I came here it was to help set up a new Ph.D. program in communications, which takes an interdisciplinary and academic approach to exploring how people and societies communicate. But since I also have a background as a journalist as well as a scholar, I've been teaching in both degree programs and I'm happy that every year some MS students want to take one of the more academic PhD courses in our program.

One class I have taught, for instance, takes a scholarly, interdisciplinary look at the social impact of media in society. This encourages the Journalism MS students to step back and think about the role of media from a the standpoint of an intelligent observer, not a practitioner—to think in a different way about how journalism works and what people want it to do.

What should would-be journalists learn in school?

My own background is history, so I think everyone should know a lot about history, of course!

Recently I was co-teacher in our required journalism ethics course. We did something I thought worked very well. We choose six topics of concern to journalists—like privacy, independence, and so on—and I gave lectures about historical aspects of those subjects while my co-professor talked to the students about current implications. What I tried to impart is an understanding that there is a historic root to the ethical questions they are dealing with. That there's a tradition of decision making and that decision making is conditioned by social factors. This, I hope, makes the students think about social factors that affect their decision making now.

In my course on journalism history I usually teach one class about story telling and mythic archetypes. It's an important class for journalists because it helps them recognize what archetypes they might be applying to the stories they are reporting and composing. It makes them ask "Am I telling this as a Cinderella story? A David and Goliath?"

One of the most important things I think for journalism education is that students learn different ways of thinking—that they open their imagination, their consciousness, to different ways of seeing the world.

That's what's so important about knowing history. When students read a lot of historical journalism they can then see that conventions of the practice have changed with time. Which allows them then to question conventions they adhere to now, and perhaps wonder which of those, will also change, and how.

To study only journalism—especially as an undergrad—is unnecessarily limiting. To be a good journalist I think it is important to cultivate an imagination. Knowing other modes of discourse, of inquiry, is very important.