Any career planning advice for a rising college senior pursuing journalism without a major?
From seemingly birth throughout high school, I dreamed of majoring in journalism and eventually delving into political and business news. But as a college freshman, advice that “journalism’s a dying field” and “It’s all about who you know” deterred me from pursuing the major. By the time I gathered the courage to switch majors, I was almost finished with my psych major and would have needed to add a completely unaffordable 5th year to add journalism.
Since experience is so crucial to journalism I’m wondering how to proceed in terms of career planning. Do the connections and experience offered by MA journalism programs justify the debt load? Or should I pursue different positions that heavily involve communications, in hopes of gaining transferable skills? I’ve gained some writing experience as I contribute monthly to a few blogs and have added a few pieces to a school magazine. This summer, I’ll be contributing to the magazine, blog, and social media of a Fortune 500 company as well. .But that’s lacking compared to j-majors, which has left me pretty uncertain of what to do next. Any advice welcome. Thanks!
Many, many journalists were not journalism majors in college. As you say, experience is crucial. Does your college have a student newspaper? If so, join the staff a.s.a.p. Report as many stories as you can.
Print journalism may be dying but the major papers that still exist have digital editions and there are people who are writing for them. Do some research and see if you can start submitting materials to political outlets like the Huffington Post or other political blogs. What about internships in business or political journalism?
Does your college/university have alums who are currently working as political or business journalists? Could you contact several of them and do informational interviews? Doing PR/social media for a Fortune 500 company is not really the same as writing about politics or business. Why not try your hand at what inspires you? There’s always a market for people who can write well. I would get the experience before considering going for an MA in journalism.
I was a journalist for 15 years before I went freelance (which is what I do now.)
Don't worry. You definitely do not have to major in journalism to be a journalist. I didn’t. In fact, it’s better if you have an expertise in some other field (science, tech.)
Do not go into debt to be a journalist.
Read No. 2 again. Really. Seriously. Don’t go into debt.
About this “dying” industry thing. The newspaper industry is dying. Maybe even magazines. But journalism lives on because people still want to know what the hell is going on in the world. If you want to be a journalist, be prepared to communicate in all the digital formats – blog, video, social media, etc. – as well as have top notch writing skills. All of those are necessary today.
To gain experience (and yes, that’s what you need – experience/clips), pitch freelance articles. Get your byline out there and get experience writing for publication. Online is fine, in print publications is fine, just write and show you want to do this.
And here’s the super secret way to get a media outlet to come to YOU with a job offer: break news. Develop an expertise in something or some topic and start pitching freelance stories that break news, stories that the journalists with jobs have to follow. If you start scooping employed reporters, some editor out there will notice: Who’s this kmac74? How come he/she is beating our reporter all the time? How can we get he/she to work for us?
I know several people in their mid/late 20s and early 30s who have developed real careers in journalism. A number of them essentially worked for free for a year or more. (The Huffington Post is a famous offender in this regard. It gives a platform to a lot of people it doesn’t pay at all. But in the cases of a couple friends-of-kids, the Huffington Post “internship” turned into real job offers elsewhere.) Others did exactly what 13thFloor suggests: they hustled freelance articles about topics that no one else was covering.
They all worked really, really hard, wrote really, really well, and were pretty much willing to starve while they were developing their reputations. (I remember running into one on the street before he got his big break, and I was worried that in his case starvation wasn’t a hyperbole.) They needed a lot of confidence in themselves, because they sure didn’t get a lot of strokes or help from other people, at least not at first. They had to do some things they weren’t proud of. (One got his first permanent, full-time job when a new editor at a weekly publication summarily fired the entire, quite distinguished staff of one flagship department and replaced them with a skeleton staff of cheap newbies. He had sold freelance stories to the prior regime, so his byline was familiar in that publication, and he had cultivated close relationships with a number of those who had been fired. He felt horrible about replacing them, but they told him that they were going to be fired anyway and he would be nuts to turn down a full-time job.)
If you aren’t doing first-rate work, the world will let you know that you need to develop a different ambition.
Sometimes, you need to go with the flow. One person I know spent years writing for publications aimed at a particular ethnic group, to which he was related on one parent’s side, but with which none of he, his parent, or the relevant grandparents ever identified. I’m sure he didn’t make a big deal of that to his editors, though. One wrote for specialty trade publications because she knew a language in which she could interview key industry figures. One stumbled into being a successful writer of celebrity profiles, which certainly wasn’t the direction in which he started. One got his first major job as the Washington correspondent of a foreign newspaper published in a language he couldn’t read or speak; he spent two years writing articles whose published versions he still hasn’t read. One works for an English-language publication in a backwater foreign capital that is only now beginning to recover from its long civil war and oppressive dictatorship.