<p>i took a year off to work for the journalist and take some more undergrad-level university courses (primarily in french and spanish language). i applied to grad school for a history PhD and will be starting there in september. i received full-funding through fellowships, so other than the start-up costs of moving to a new city, i will be getting paid for going to school rather than paying them for the privilege to attend.</p>
<p>a few people, including one who worked as a journalist for years before becoming a history professor himself, told me that it’s still quite realistic to move into journalism with a history PhD, or to do both simultaneously, and that the expertise the PhD will give me will almost guarantee that i’ll be hired to cover my regions of interest (latin america and the caribbean). i was hoping that NYU’s joint journalism and latin american studies degree would’ve accomplished this, but i was told by journalists, a news director, and a handful of professors that dabble in journalism that a masters in area studies wouldn’t let me cover what i wanted to but a PhD would improve my odds of being assigned feature-length or op-ed coverage of my interests. i also wouldn’t mind being a professor, but i’m not the type of humanities PhD applicant that NEEDS to go into academia to be happy.</p>
<p>and here’s the deal on learning ethics and media law:</p>
<p>some people get journalism BAs. these people have a very hard time getting hired at prestigious publications without years of experience first because many there think 1) they’ll need to completely untrain and retrain the candidate so they can effectively function within their own structure, and 2) that they don’t have any broader liberal arts base of knowledge to draw from. i tend to agree.</p>
<p>at the graduate level, many grad journalism programs (including all the ones with prestige and networking) see a BA in journalism or mass comm as a negative. they too want to see an applicant with a BA or BS that gives them analytical skills and a base of knowledge. the practicum will be taught during the masters, so entering with the skill set already in place but little intellectual base of knowledge is less than ideal. again, untraining and retraining those journalism BAs.</p>
<p>at the hiring level, as i said, few prestigious publications look favorably upon journalism BAs. from there, some see the masters degrees as a real asset, and others see it as a hindrance for the same reason they don’t like the BAs. it’s 50/50 on what organization likes the masters vs what organization doesn’t, so having the masters degree is just as good as not having it.</p>
<p>the debt is something to seriously consider, especially since journalists don’t get paid well unless they’re superstars, and you won’t get full funding in j-school (and partial funding is very rare as well). having an IR background will, unfortunately, not convince anyone to hire you as an international correspondent right off the bat. you could work to that over many years and get there eventually, but you’d be starting in local coverage just like anyone else would. what WOULD make a real difference is your fluency in spanish. that, more than the IR, could get you jobs as a foreign correspondent, or at least as a reporter/analyst of international news.</p>