#BadAdviceToYoungJournalists

Felix Salmon’s piece with advice for young journalists had a lot of pertinent information, both within his personal experience within the industry and about the industry as a whole. After reading his article, I was surprised by his conclusions because his evidence drew me in exactly the opposite direction.
When he listed his “boring” jobs that allowed him to get to the point where he could start blogging professionally, that made a lot of sense to me. The best “amateur” bloggers, who don’t have formal training in journalism, put in a tremendous amount of legwork, also put in a lot of time within their own domain. For example, Nate Silver didn’t wake up and start creating accurate predictions of who the next president would be. Instead, he spent years as a professional statistician, explaining statistics to people who weren’t as well versed in math as he was. Salmon’s conclusion of encouraging people to pursue “great journalism” and not take the nitty gritty path to storytelling flies in the face of his own evidence. He isn’t writing entertaining and informative pieces despite his work on Latin American bond markets. Those experiences helped foment his skills as a writer. Although the job market in general for journalism is weak the low-level reporting about high school sports games, bond releases and crime blotters has to be done by somebody, and each of those if done well enough can either lead to another job either vertically (through promotion within the same news organization) or horizontally (by either creating one’s own media or getting hired into a PR job at whatever is being covered).
Ezra Klein’s advice to not go to journalism school and instead get educated in a different field seemed incomplete to me. Relying on classes in order to learn best practices is dangerous, but a lot of the tools of journalism would be difficult to learn on one’s own. Although it would be theoretically possible to learn those skills just by reading online or taking classes through the Photography or the Film Studies’ department, having a core curriculum forces students to be better rounded. The compelling takeaway from many of these articles that insulted J schools is to also master a non-journalism subject, which is why I am planning on ramping up the amount of economics classes I take.
The plan of “horizontal loyalty” or networking within peers sounds good, but I’m not sure how to apply it. It makes sense at the level of campus publications, but Ann Friedman’s idea that “this is a small industry” doesn’t really ring true to me, unless you limit the scope of the “industry” to a micro level (say the community of sports reporters that cover Duck games). As I haven’t found my calling within journalism yet, this is especially difficult to put into practice.
Moving forward not much of this advice isn’t going to prompt me to suddenly drop out of the J school or live on Twitter. I will redouble my efforts to read more often and read a broader scope of writing, as well as trying to build masteries outside of journalism so that I can understand some stories from multiple angles.

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