Thoughts on Education for Aspiring Journalists
(This essay was originally an answer to a question posted on a journalism email list.)
I am tired of reporters who have studied journalism but have no clue about the subject matter they’re covering. Jay Rosen @ NYU has told me more than once that he likes to see journalism studied in conjunction with another discipline. I agree with Jay. But I also believe that the best way to become a well-rounded reporter is to work in many different jobs and learn at least a little about all of them, which is how Samuel Clemens and I approached the field. (Note, though, that neither of us went to college, so just going out and learning a whole lot of stuff on your own will not get you a media company job in a degree-fixated world.)
To me, the idea of a degree in journalism as the only necessary qualification to cover everything from zoning disputes to homicide cases to conflicts in Africa is as silly as the now-deprecated idea that holding an MBA, all by itself, meant you were qualified to run any kind of business from a restaurant to a software company.
At the moment, I’m frantically learning about automated IC design software and even more frantically learning about health care IT because I see a growing number of freelance writing opportunities in these two areas. They are ultra-niche fields where virtually all the readers have a good grasp of the subject matter themselves. There is no way you can have credibility with those readers unless you obviously know the field (and the players) at least as well as they do. That’s why I’m studying them *before* trying to write about them.
For the past 15 years I’ve made a pretty good living writing for “expert audiences,” primarily in science and technology. Lately, I’ve been thinking that what I fell into by accident is what everyone who survives in journalism will be doing in the future. I don’t mean writing about science and technology, but catering to expert audiences. Think of the hyperlocal journalism concept. To be an excellent hyperlocal journalist, you must know your territory as thoroughly as I know Linux and FOSS (Free & Open Source Software).
This doesn’t mean knowing just the white bread parts of town, but at least a little about everyone, everywhere. You should know what bars to hit to get biker group gossip, have phone numbers for a bunch of patrol cops and detectives, not just official police spokespeople, be comfortable at the local country club, and so forth.
I’m not denigrating the ability to string paragraphs together or spell correctly (and to ALWAYS confirm name spellings). These are essential skills, just as you must know where to put your fingers on the fretboard if you want to play guitar. The thing is, the mechanics of journalism and of music are *not* journalism or music. They are merely tools used to produce the stories and songs. To be an outstanding writer or musician, you must have something to write or sing/play about that others will want to read or hear.
Finding and telling great stories is what makes great journalism. And the more you know about the places, topics, events, and people you cover, the more likely you are to find great stories, and the more likely you are to know how to tell them to your audience in a manner that will engage and excite them and bring them back for more of your work.
A degree only helps get you past HR departments and silly corporate hiring rules. If you’re a straight-liner, you might as well choose your major by finding out what degree programs are most likely to get you the kind of job you want, and use that knowledge as your selection criterion. But please, do not confuse credentialization with learning. They are not the same thing. By the time you graduated from high school, you had three times as much formal education as Herman Melville and 10 times as much as Abraham Lincoln, and I think most of us would consider both of them well-educated.
And if you *do* get a degree, and can’t find a job in your chosen field, please don’t think this means you’re an idiot. Albert Einstein had the same problem. After earning a bachelor’s in math and physics, he spent two years searching for a teaching position — without any success — before a friend’s father finally helped him get a job with the Swiss patent office. As a clerk.
If you consider journalism a calling, as Einstein obviously considered physics, you will take the equivalent of his patent clerk job, if that’s all you can get, and do your reporting on your own time. This could end up getting you a job, once you’ve proved your ability on your blog or whatever site you decide to put up as a personal showcase, and it might also lead to your site becoming popular enough on its own that you don’t need a job working for someone else. If this happens, and you decide to work on your own website full-time, you will become the 21st century equivalent of the many 19th century American editor/publisher entrepreneurs who competed fiercely with each other for scoops, readers, and advertising.
Yes, I know. Back then there were no media conglomerates. But note that today those conglomerates are losing market share.
Someone still needs to fill the American public’s hunger for news of everything from local sports to political scandals to celebrity stupidity, and there’s no reason that “someone” can’t be you.
March 2nd, 2009 at 9:31 am
I find myself agreeing with you constantly. I’d like to add one point to your “what makes a journalist” requirements.
To me, not only is going out and doing a lot of jobs a prerequisite, but they should also do a lot of “walking in the shows of their audience”. I can’t tell you the amount of journalists I know with such closed minded views of the world. They can’t see past their own opinions to look at another person’s perspective, how they got into a situation, why they are there, what drives them, etc. Empathy seems lost on many reporters, as they treat their subjects as statistics tainted by their own world views.
I guess that’s why I’ve always wanted to be a reporter. I wanted to change all of that, even if it was only for my readers.
March 2nd, 2009 at 10:35 pm
I’ve spent the last couple of days at a Poynter Institute conference — http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Poynter-program#Preliminary_Program — where professional journalists are saying the same thing. Well, some of them are.
There’s a whole movement inside the news business that says they need to reconnect with the communities they cover. Since I made the move from writing fiction to writing non-fiction while I was also driving a cab (in Baltimore), I had no trouble “connecting” with “my community” from day one. A cabby meets people from all walks (and rides) of life, and learns his or her city better than almost anyone — including most cops, who tend to work a single precinct or type of crime rather than getting all over the place and meeting all kinds of people.
I could go on and on about this, but I won’t. As a reporter and editor, I’ve always seen myself as my readers’ representative, not as some sort of superior being. I figure my job is to go out and learn what they’d learn on their own if they had the time. That’s it. Not great art, nothing fancy. Just inform people — and maybe entertain a little, too, along the way.