Therookieprofessor

J-School value ...

I reported to you earlier that a majority of my journalism friends said they didn’t go to journalism school. The official tally in my very unscientific survey: Among the 15, 5 went to journalism school; 9 did not; and 2 were kind of split (one minored in journalism, the other earned a mass comm. degree). Should a would-be journalist go to J-School or not? I guess you can go either way. Paul Steiger at The Wall Street Journal explained:

“I've concluded from my own experience and that of others I've encountered over the years with similar backgrounds that journalism school, while certainly a help, isn't necessary to a career in journalism. A broad education experience—
in or out of journalism school—that includes a lot of reading and writing is the most important foundation.”

Though in the minority, each of the J-School graduates recalled an important lesson from their college days.

Accuracy was the holy grail for Gina Lubrano, the Readers Representative at the San Diego Union-Tribune (my old paper). “I went to San Jose State, which has an EXCELLENT journalism department. Anyway, accuracy was emphasized every single day. At the beginning of the Spartan Daily class every day (we produced the daily paper), our advisers would go over the good and the bad in the paper. Errors were assigned a red X on a chart that was kept in the office. At the end of the year, the advisers treated us to Red X cupcakes. That was the only time anyone in the class wanted a Red X. It really was a Scarlet Letter.”

Marlene Bagley, a staff editor on the Styles Desk at The New York Times, recalled that ethics was stressed in each of her journalism classes. “(The) test came up rather quickly in the first year of my first reporting
job. I wrote a feature on a small flower and gift shop (I don't remember why, but I think there was a reason!!!), and a day after it appeared in the paper, the shop's owner sent the most beautiful gift basket full of fruit, candy, flowers, etc. Of course, I couldn't accept it, which I explained to the shop owner who seemed to both understand and appreciate my explanation. (My co-workers and I made the shop owner particularly happy, by the way, when we decided to buy the basket.)

Mae Cheng, an assistant city editor at Newsday (and president of Unity: Journalists of Color) remembers a very practical lesson: “The most important mental barrier I had to get over was the idea of getting clips, clips and more clips. By doing, I got better. But also, unlike other professions that look at your GPA, you are really judged by your work in newspapers.”

--Posted by Jon, the rookie professor, preparing for new faculty orientation

posted by Jon and/or Kamilah @ 12:08 PM 1 comments

Yikes! Are journalism schools necessary?

Now that I’m hurtling towards the start of classes, I’ve started to think about what journalism students need to know. So I emailed more than a dozen friends—successful newspaper and TV journalists around the country—with this question: What was the most important thing you learned in journalism school? I got a wide variety of responses—learning about the value of accuracy and ethics, for example. (I’ll post more on this, later.)

But the most startling revelation for me was that a MAJORITY of those I contacted did NOT go to journalism school. More typically, they studied something else—like history, English or science—and caught the “journalism bug” after working on the campus newspaper and then hit the streets. Paul Steiger, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, explains:

“I worked on the Yale Daily News student newspaper in college and was able to wangle a summer job (they didn't use the word "internship" then) as a reporter at the Trenton (NJ) Times. Clips from there and from some sporadic magazine writing landed me an entry-level reporting job at the Wall Street Journal. The Journal gave me a heavy dose of on-the-job training.”

Stan Honda, a photographer for Agence France-Presse, offered a similar experience: “I didn't go to journalism school because that's not what I started out to do. Wanted to go into some sort of science and thought I would do some work for the Triton Times (later the Guardian) at the University of California, San Diego. Ended up having too much fun at the paper and decided this would be interesting work.”

In an email posted from Delhi, Pamela Constable, a high-flying foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, put it this way:

“I did not go to journalism school because I thought it was more important to get started in the real world, and I never looked back.”

Maybe I should have asked this question BEFORE selling my house in New Jersey? More on this later.

--Posted by Jon, the rookie professor, house-hunting in California

posted by Jon and/or Kamilah @ 8:46 AM 0 comments