When journalism schools were founded, mostly in public universities in the Midwest and South, their primary function was to provide cheap labor for the newspaper industry. Savvy college administrators saw the PR value in this role plus the added benefit that some of those low-paid hands would eventually rise to the top and become sentimental advocates for their old schools in their positions of influence.

For most of this century, the newspaper business changed so slowly that at any given moment it appeared to its participants to be in a steady state. The little innovation that was needed was on the mechanical side, making the transport of news faster and cheaper. But the skills needed to produce the editorial product did not change, and the ideal journalism professor was a craftsperson who could share skills honed on the job with young people who would enter the same kind of world the professor had left.

A Ph.D. is a research degree, and a craft that sees no need to change perceives little need for research.

Journalism professors were motivated to discover new knowledge, not by the industry they served, but by the social climate of academe where the ideal professor is defined not only by teaching ability but by the new knowledge that he or she creates.

To fill this social need in the absence of industry financial support, journalism professors and their Ph.D. students had to develop ingeniously trivial projects on low budgets, experimental studies with sophomore subjects, content analysis of materials that were easy to acquire, and small-sample mail surveys. That was one strike against them in their efforts to gain industry acceptance.

The second strike was in the narrow subject matter of scholarly communication. The most talented academic researchers work on tiny pieces of large puzzles. If enough pieces are found for a puzzle, an understandable pattern will emerge and illuminate a vast area of knowledge that both academics and practitioners can appreciate. But the individual reports on the single pieces are usually interesting only to other researchers working on the same puzzle.

Journalists are accustomed to reading stories. A story has a problem, a conflict, and resolution. It ends with a nice sense of closure. Academic research reports end with uncertainty and a plea for further research. An academic article is not fun to read unless you have been following the work on the same problem over a period of time.

Strike three is the use of technical jargon. Physicians and engineers don't complain about the use of jargon in their technical reports. It saves time, allowing one word to substitute for a paragraph of explaining what the initiate already knows. But professional journalists expect all expository writing to be intelligible to lay persons. Some even deny the existence of a body of knowledge in their field that is so esoteric as to require technical terms.

There have been some noble efforts to overcome these problems and explain academic research to the profession. Leo Bogart's book "Preserving the Press" illuminates the efforts of the old Newspaper Advertising Bureau to improve the marketability of newspapers through research. Gerald Stone codified many individual researcher efforts into a coherent set of themes in his "Examining Newspapers." And Keith Stamm, with funding from the American Newspaper Publishers Association, shed light an the connection between sense of community and newspaper readership in a compelling way that contributed to the theoretical basis for what is now called "public journalism." But most doctorate-holding communication researchers do not connect that well with the industry.

That's changing.

Like most broad changes, this one is born of necessity. The steady-state world of the newspaper business is gone forever.

Newspapers are no longer a natural monopoly, no longer the exclusive gatekeeper between retail advertisers and their customers. The swiftness of technological change is suddenly making us more like other professions.

Engineering, medicine, business administration, library science - almost any profession you can name that has research committed professional schools has always generated a continuing demand for new knowledge. Every new graduating class from a school of engineering or medicine is viewed nervously by the practitioners in its field because the kids have knowledge that the old guys don't. Aging engineers wind up in administrative or sales jobs because the technology has changed faster than their ability to keep up.

The sources of that change have been people with research degrees, many of them in universities.

Whether you are ready or not, that is happening to us, even on the craft side. New graduates who can create Web pages, digitize photographs and do electronic searching are in demand precisely because they have skills that midcareer professionals haven't had the time or interest to acquire. There is also demand for newly trained database reporters who have analytical and statistical skills never learned by their seniors.

Those are the obvious technology-based changes. The next round of change is not so obvious.

The values of journalism have been driven by a marketplace that assumes a scarcity of information. John Milton's poetic plea for unlicensed printing saw information about anything, as a good in and of itself. Our age of information overload is putting that old equation under stress. Today, it is attention, not information that is the scarce good. And advertising-supported media are resorting to some bizarre strategies to capture their share of attention. Just two examples:

• Pushing the envelop of tastelessness by promoting obscenity, violence, and profanity - even in what used to be television's family hour.

• Corrupting news and entertainment products by blending them with commercial messages so that the user never knows where the journalist's or artist's work ends and the pitchman begins.

Suddenly, the journalist's job is more complicated than delivering information. Now the problem is not getting it into people's hands. We have to worry about what gets into their heads.

The successful journalists of the near future will have to understand the processes and effects of mass communication and the theories that try to explain them as well as the craft skills of writing, editing, design and production.

Technology is forcing us into professional status whether we want to be professionals or not. One thing that distinguishes a professional from a craftsperson is knowledge of theory, the underlying principles that make the craft work.

A craft is learned by emulation: watching a master perform and then imitating that person. A profession is learned from first principles so that when things change, the professional understand the changes and adjusts techniques to fit.

Journalism education has less room for old guys like me who teach the old craft skills and talk about the way things were when we were in the business. The world has moved on.

Today we have a desperate need for theory, for new ways of understanding the media environment and the choices that we are forced to make. Research universities with strong Ph.D. programs are our best hope for developing that new knowledge.

Meyer is a graduate school drop-out who occupies the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.