High school girls still dream of being Rory Gilmore, the fictional daughter in The Gilmore Girls TV show who headed straight from a Yale journalism degree to a job covering Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
That’s what I discovered at career day at my old high school last week. More than 80 girls from St. Mary’s Academy in Portland, Oregon, listened to me and two other alums talk about writing careers on one of more than a dozen panels presented during the day.
I had the unhappy job of informing them career options for journalism graduates today aren’t anything they”re likely to see on TV. With newspapers and magazines laying off staff by the thousands and people getting more of their news online, the industry is changing completely.
That doesn’t mean there are no opportunities, I explained. There will always be some newspaper and magazine jobs. But there will be even more opportunities elsewhere, at Web-based publishers, trade magazines, community papers, etc. Heck, even Rory Gilmore ended up writing for a Website.
The key, I suggested, is to learn the basics, keep up with the latest tech skills, get experience interning and be flexible. In hard times like these when you’re just starting out and jobs are scarce, where you work isn’t as important as the opportunities you have to put your education into practice. Finding a mentor or someone you can shadow is another great way to see what a job’s like from the inside out.
In preparation for my talk, I asked some other journalist friends on Twitter what advice they had for students thinking of journalism careers. Here’s what they said:
— RUN AWAY!!!!
— Just tell them the truth. Things are really tough now, so they’ll have to be entrepreneurial.
— There’s still work as a journalist and it’s still a noble profession, despite what they may hear. The thing that drives young journos is a passion for the ability to make change. That’s still possible!
— It’s a tech career. That you should want to be your own boss. That you should be able to put up a site from scratch.
— It’s not for the thinned skin, and it’s not cut out for everyone. It’s not a 9 to 5 job, either.
Besides wanting to know about jobs, students asked a lot of questions about the writing process and what it’s like to be a freelancer. How do you find time to write? How do you keep yourself from getting distracted? How do you get motivated when you have to write about boring stuff? Do you write stories and then find someplace to buy them? How do you get assignments from national magazines? In a way it’s comforting to know that the questions 15- and 16-year-olds ask are the same ones veteran freelancers ask themselves all the time.
A couple students wanted to know about being editors – what do they do, and how do you get that kind of job? My answer: editors are essentially managers, coordinating reporters and assignments. They have to be organized, communicate well and grasp the big picture but also be detailed-oriented so things don’t fall through the cracks. I’ve worked as an editor before, and if you aspire to be an editor, I’d say start by working as a writer so you know what it takes. That way when you’ll have realistic expectations of what reporters can do and you’ll have more credibility with your staff.
No, it’s not the best time to be headed to journalism school or looking for a job as a reporter or editor. But it wasn’t when I started my career either. If you want it enough, you can make it happen. Spending the day with a roomful of students enthusiastic about the profession convinced me of that.
“Ended up writing for a website?”
You make that sound like second-best. Believe me, often it’s not.
I am a freelancer whose income comes almost entirely from on-line sales, and I see no disadvantages to it.
At a professional site, you can not only sell a story for more than you can to a magazine or a newspaper, but for an audience three or four times larger than for a print sale.
This post is just another example of how quickly times are changing. While opportunities for the so-called “old media”–i.e., magazines and daily newspapers–other opportunities are slowly, but surely emerging. It’s just that aspiring journalists just have to work harder to find those opportunities, the so-called “diamonds in the rough”.
I tell my students all the time that jobs in journalism will always exist. It’s more of a matter of how the news will be conveyed to the public as we move further away from print. If anything, it’s exciting that we all have more opportunities to write, publish and communicate than ever before thanks to the Internet.
As a Junior in high school currently, with apirations in breaking into the journalism field, I found this very supportive. I have had planty tell me that the field will die and my dream with it sooner than later, but still cannot see any other field that would suit as a career for me. My question is this:
An individual informed me that my best luck in getting a job woud be to get my degree in Multimedia Communications. Another informed me that I should minor in something other than journalism and go on to get a degree in a particular area of journalism.
What would be most beneficial to me when it comes to college and schooling if I want to break into the journalism field??????
Thank you again to Michelle Rafter and others whose ideas and thoughts have instilled a higher degree of confidence in my future!!!
Rachel:
Bravo for sticking to your plans to get into journalism. While some people see a dying industry, I’m in the camp that believe we’re just transitioning to what it will look like five or ten years from now.
As someone who didn’t major in journalism – my college didn’t have a program so I did an English major instead and worked on the school’s weekly newspaper as much as I could – I don’t think you have to be a journalism major to get into the field. Some people major in something else as an undergrad then go to journalism grad school to learn about reporting, research and writing. There’s something to be said for getting a good background in the social sciences, statistics, business or the arts if those are areas you’d like to pursue as a reporter. Solid training in art, film or dance history could serve as a basis for being a reviewer or critic. The research you’d have to do as a sciences, engineering or social sciences undergrad would be fantastic training for doing computer-assisted reporting – because you’d understand what makes a good study. Or you could get a computer sciences degree and get into the Web development side of journalism – even with newspaper and magazine staff jobs scare these days journalists who know how to code are a hot commodity.
I agree with the person who told you it’s a good idea to know how to tell a story in more than one medium – print, pictures, video, online, etc. – because more news organizations are adopting all of those. Even if you end up not doing all of those things, you’ll probably collaborate in work teams that use all of those, so you at least have to understand how all those elements fit together to create one story package. But a lot of journalism programs are already doing this, so if you go to j-school, this is something you’d end up doing anyway.
As you can see, there are lots of ways get to where you want to be in a journalism career. Whether you end up deciding j school is best for you or not, take advantage of opportunities on campus to work in the field, on the campus paper, website, radio or TV station, to get as much practical experience as you can. And get as many internships as you can: you’ll get to test out what that kind of job would be like, and build up materials for your portfolio.
Good luck,
Michelle