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Considering a Career in Journalism?
What prompted this
| | A high school student considering a career in Journalism visited the other day. Over the next hour, I said too much to absorb. So, for later reflection, here is some of the advice I gave:
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Liberal Arts or J-School?
| | Faced with the choice of going to Colgate University for Liberal Arts or Syracuse University, my parents and I visited the dean of Syracuse's Newhouse School of Communications. Dean Wes Clark asked, "How sure are you that you want to be a journalist? Because, if you're not sure, get a Liberal Arts degree. With a Liberal Arts foundation, we can always teach you what you need to know about journalism later on."
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Why Liberal Arts?
| | Liberal Arts in college should help you learn how to think better. Of course, high school students think they think well enough now, but that's to be expected.
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| | For who has ever considered himself lacking in sense? That would be a self-contradictory proposition. Lack of sense is a disease that never exists when it is seen; it is most tenacious and strong, yet the first glance from the patient's eye pierces it through and disperses it, as a dense mist is dispersed by the sun's beams. ... There never was a street-porter or silly woman who was not sure of having as much sense as was necessary. We readily recognize in others a superiority in courage, physical strength, experience, agility, or beauty. But a superior judgment we concede to nobody. And we think that we could ourselves have discovered the reasons which occur naturally to others, if only we had looked in the same direction.
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| | Ignorance of the essential nature of language -- in the fact that it is essential for thought -- jeopardizes our future.
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| | Many of my students seem unable to express themselves in any language whatsoever. They aren't utterly mute, of course. They can say something about the weather. And give instructions about how to get to the post office. They are able to recite numerous slogans, especially from television commercials, and the lyrics of popular songs and recent -- very recent -- political campaigns. They are able to read traffic signs and many billboards and even some newspapers. They can claim certain emotions with regard to various teams and even individual athletes whose names they often know. They can spin more or less predictable reveries about the past, or the future, either in very simple concrete terms or in sentimental banalities or both. But they cannot pursue a process. They cannot say why evidence leads to a conclusion. They cannot find examples for analogies. They have never even heard of analogies. People in that condition don't think of themselves as being in that condition because they don't THINK of themselves. They honestly don't think at all.
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| | You plan your future based on what you think. So, because you Your very best future depends on it, it's important to be as correct as you can be. People think themselves right, not necessarily because they are right, but simply because they think they are right. You can recall instances in your experience when you thought you were right and you were not. That presents a problem. If you think you're correct, how are you going to discover when you are not?
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| | Francis Bacon recommended:
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| | Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
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| | The Liberal Arts help you to think clearly. There are seven liberal arts, and the first three, known as the Trivium are Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. Grammar helps assure that your thoughts are soundly constructed. Logic helps assure that those thoughts are consistent. Rhetoric helps both explain your thoughts to the world and check what the world says back.
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Selecting a college
| | College programs are different. Ask the professionals. For instance, if you are considering becoming a lawyer, some schools emphasize "law" while others emphasize "justice -- and there is a great difference between the two. The former might emphasize procedures, the latter might emphasize philosophy.
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| | Journalism schools might emphasize writing, braodcasting, public relations. While following the latest technology might seem the place to go, remember, if you can't write, the latest technology won't save you.
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While in college
| | The basics are still the basics
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| | Like gravity, everyone knows what journalism is until called upon to define it. You will discover that a lot of what passes for journalism, isn't. Part of your job will be to learn to recognize the difference. You'll learn that being "objective" isn't as useful a goal as is being fair and balanced. You'll learn that that is hard because media acts like a lens to magnify what you are looking at at the expense of everything else that surrounds it. You'll learn that when you become an advocate, in the scene, it's too easy to lose your trust and your readership. You'll learn that trust is all you have to sell and that if you lose trust once, you've lost it forever.
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| | Find excellence and go there
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| | It doesn't cost you any more to put yourself in the sphere of excellent professors -- regardless of what subjects they teach. In my time at Colgate I took Doc Reading's European History. Kistler's Shakespeare was filled. I signed up and took a third year Sedimentology course because the Professor had an excellent reputation. Without any prerequisites under my belt, I visited the professor and asked for permission to take his course. Excellence creates a vortex of energy. Whatever hard work might be involved, it seems a lighter load than ordinary classes.
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| | Ideas stand apart from one who thinks them
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| | So feel free to integrate into your fabric everything of value. As Montaigne said, "I'll run to the truth and embrace it as soon as I see it coming."
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| | Master logic and it masters you
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| | Your goal in any class should be to discover why a particular course is valuable. "Why" isn't facts.
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| | As Robert Heilbronner wrote, mastering logic means it masters you. Once the validity of "two plus two equals four" is brought home to you, no cant, no disavowal, will change your understanding. No public protestation that "two plus two equals five" will change your innermost understanding. Once the truth and usefulness of certain logic becomes evident, it has mastered you. When "why" becomes integrated into your core process, nothing can ever deflect you. Courage and strength come from this understanding.
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Breadth of experience
| | Go abroad. You must. Americans are at a disadvantage in the world because of its prominence in the media. In most countries, people are exposed to their national news and, for a second point of view, the news as presented by the dominant economies: Australia and the United States, China and the United States, Kenya and the United States. In America, our news choices tend to be the United States and the United States. Other countries have the advantage of looking at the world through at least two points of view. We often don't. It's like standing with one eye closed and trying to estimate the distance an object is away from you.
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| | The other reason to go abroad is to understand which problems are in your head and which ones are built in to your community. There is a difference. You can only sort them out if you travel.
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After you graduate
| | Two years and "meerkat"... Two years and "meerkat"
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| | Every job you take becomes a life-changing choice. A choice isn't necessarily "bad" or "good" -- it simply makes you a different person than if you had taken the other choice. You want to make those choices so as to minimize looking back later on to say "Gee, I wish I had done that instead." So after you graduate, if you can, consider the next several years to be testing the water.
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| | Live your life in two-year chunks. At this time of life, every two years, because of experience, you are essentially a different person. So after two years, lift your head up and look around, like meerkats do standing sentry. Then ask yourself, "Is this what I want to be doing now?
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| | My general formula for my students is "Follow your bliss." Find where it is, and don't be afraid to follow it.
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| | Your "future" can get in the way of all your "todays"
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| | For the longest time, I didn't get married. A good portion of the reason why was because I hadn't found a good woman who would put up with me at the same time I would put up with her. But there was another important reason. I was looking for someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Mistake. From that perspective, the rest of your life is a long, long time.
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| | Point of View helps. It is a mistake to live your life as futures when you really live life as a series of todays. As soon as I realized that I had found someone I wanted to spend all my todays with, marriage to that person came easily. As John Lennon said:
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| | Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
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| | Have a plan, but don't necessarily follow it
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| | I backed in to virtually every opportunity and job I ever took. My initial courses, beyond Core courses, would have allowed pre-med. Then, anticipating a career in law, I planned to major in Political Science. After a few courses I concluded that they were mostly concerned with "Little-t truths" -- what they taught, while true, was not terribly useful. I switched my major, backing into to History.
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| | To fulfil my major, I backed into the single most important course I have ever taken -- Historiography: the history of the study of history -- which I recommend to everyone. Why? It's where I first learned that people think they are right, not because they are right, but because they think they are right. [See "Liberal Arts" above. It 's also where I learned to get beyond chaos and sophistry, but that's another topic.]
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| | While at Colgate I helped rebuild the Colgate radio station, WRCU, with a friend who later went to work for IBM. After graduating and then resigning from the wrong law school, I returned to Colgate to temporarily work in the computer lab. Shortly thereafter I followed my friend and backed in to IBM Large Systems Design and Development in Poughkeepsie, NY.
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| | Two years later, one of our three housemates was asked to move to the Netherlands to salvage a University computer center. He declined but suggested others who lived there. Kurt Vonnegut's "An invitation to travel is like a dancing lesson from God" stuck in my mind as I backed in to the unanticipated job -- an opportunity to manage people, to learn a foreign language and to live in Europe. So in the middle 1970s I backed in to learning hypertext editing packages before darpanet became the internet. More than two years later, I chose to back in to our family-owned newspaper to help them with technology for a short time instead of backing in to a job offer with the United Nations in Budapest, Hungary, that had been offered.
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| | Journalists who come to our 15,000 circulation daily newspaper tend to be of two types. One type considers the newspaper a step on a career path to a larger newspaper; an opportunity to develop both skills and a reputation. A position at a newspaper such as ours allows people to learn skills that they'd never have a chance to learn at a more segmented, larger newspaper. It is in the mind of this category of journalist to more to a larger, regional newspaper after a few years. We've had wonderful staffers do that and move on to win top-notch awards or assume positions at top news organizations.
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| | Still others decide that our location is a delightful place to settle and raise a family. Sometimes journalists of type one discover that, over time, they have become type two. Good for them. While newspapers our size don't pay large salaries, the countervailing benefit is quality of life.
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What do managing editors look for?
| | Someone who can write clearly. That helps show that you can think clearly. That's important for every job. I once hired a maintenance person based on the cover letter to the job application. It showed me that the person would be able to think independently.
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| | During the job interview, we test people on: - grammar,
- spelling,
- fact selection,
- composition,
- mathematics,
- keyboarding,
- computer skills,
- presentation,
- and more.
A college degree is almost a given. We prefer job experience from, at the very least, a smaller newspaper or an internship -- something to show that you can work on deadline and produce quality. A portfolio is nice, but bylined clippings might have been "saved" by good editing behind the scenes.
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A publisher's advice
| | Many people outside the newspaper suspect that the publisher tells reporters and editors what to print. That's because if they were publisher, that's what they would do. My guidance is simple. I tell new newsroom employees only one thing:
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| | Tomorrow, I want you to be able to look back on what you wrote today and feel proud about what you have done.
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Why journalism and why now?
| | Around 1310, Giotto's visual representation of perspective presaged the changes in the mental tools people used to manage their mental map of reality. [See: Instruments of change: then and now.] Shortly thereafter literary points of view appeared in Boccaccio's "Decameron". What followed was the first self-referential period in history -- The Renaissance.
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| | The dramatic change introducing linear perception in the 1300s is similar to the dramatic change introducing dynamic perception -- feedback systems -- that began in the last century and carries over today. Feedback systems can be constructive or destructive. Journalism will help us distinguish between the two and learn to cope.
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| | Journalism is like a magnifying lens over the map of reality. What is seen distorts the map to give a clearer view of what is under the lens, but the image is out of proportion to everything else. In a rapidly changing world -- a more dynamic world with less opportunity to pause and reflect -- part of the journalists job will be to help inoculate readers to defend themselves where previously, time and distance effectively dampened response.
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| | The journalism of your parents -- where A.J. Liebling's "Freedom of the press belongs to the man that owns one" -- is rapidly changing to where technology assures that nearly everyone can operate a press but the result is not necessarily news. To ride on the bow wave of such great change -- to be able to weigh in to help assure a sound future -- is simply exhilarating.
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H.L. Mencken's "Honor"
| | For "H.L. Mencken", the wonderful master of american language and journalism, the most important word in his lexicon was "honor". One shouldn't learn rules about what to do. One should learn how to decide what to do. See A sense of honor.
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One final note
| | I hope this helps you make your career choices. I don't expect this all to make sense until you tumble over it in your own good time and see it through the lens of your own experience. Having gotten this far, it should come as no surprise to see that the tools for journalism are the tools for living wisely.
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Discuss
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