Therookieprofessor

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