writing and journalism

Journalism is a great field to pursue. It pays little -- I made $40K a year only after being in the field for five years and making what proved for me to be an ill-advised move into copy editing -- but in terms of job satisfaction, I have found it to be more than fulfilling. What a journalist does matters, which is one of the reasons we get so upset when they do it wrong. There is no feeling like writing a news story and then seeing it used by both sides in a debate to support their cases.

I also found that being a reporter was a tremendous asset to me in terms of creatve writing. Because I had to write constantly to meet deadline, I learned that it didn't matter if I felt "inspired" or not. Deadline waits for no one, and if today you turn out crap, you can rest assured your editor will hand it back to you to improve. Being a reporter has boosted my understanding of the way people think, it's increased my knowledge of government at all levels (and therefore made me more effective at getting attention as a private citizen since I know which buttons to push), it's improved my sense of good and corny dialogue, and it's generally made me a better creative and nonfiction writer.

For someone planning to pursue writing as a career but not necessarily in journalism, I would recommend going somewhere other than journalism school, especially if she already has clips from the area newspaper. This will give her a broad background to draw from, rather than just journalistic writing, and will make her a better-rounded person.

In my experience, not having a degree in journalism is not a liability for getting a job in that field. I didn't have such a degree, nor have some of the best reporters and editors I've worked with. Conversely, some of the worst ones I have, do.

As to who writes better, a lit major or a J-major, that's one of the major unsettled debates of our time. J-school teaches word economy, which is essential for good writing, while most academics teach their students to write long. On the other hand, many news articles are about as exciting to read as the ingredients on a can of pop, though that may be due as much to the writer's inability to understand what counts as news and what's merely political preening as to anything else.

Back when I was managing editor at a local newspaper, I hired two full-time reporters. My interest wasn't in their college degrees -- in fact, I can't even remember for certain if my second hire had one. What mattered to me was whether they could write well enough that I wouldn't be coming back to them with oodles of questions and essentially writing the stories for them.

My first hire had a journalism degree from Columbia University, and his writing was dry, flat and lifeless. He also had, in my estimation, a skewed judgment of what made news (too much on meetings, not enough on people).

I don't recall what my second hire had her degree in; to be honest, I can't even recall that she had a college degree. But she could write. The only published piece she had before she came to the paper was a piece of fiction she had written, but it was engrossing.

Incidentally, when the New Jersey Press Association handed out awards for the 2000 press year, she picked up a first-place award in breaking news coverage and I think another award as well. The journalism grad got zilch.