<p>Please help!!!</p>
<p>Journalism is dying. Newspapers are folding (no pun intended). Anybody and everybody with a blog or podcast can be a “journalist.” So why pigeon-hole yourself?</p>
<p>If you ultimately decide to pursue journalism, keep in mind that the best writers for the NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, etc. were liberal arts majors, not “journalism” majors. You have to ask yourself: Do you want to go to college to learn how to think for yourself? To learn new and exciting ideas which can be applicable to all fields? Or, do you want to be taught a (limited and obsolete) vocational trade? Only you truly know the answer.</p>
<p>Some more food for thought:</p>
<p>[Welcome</a> to a dying industry, journalism grads - SFGate](<a href=“http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-05-31/opinion/17203559_1_food-stamps-ladies-cleaning]Welcome”>http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-05-31/opinion/17203559_1_food-stamps-ladies-cleaning)</p>
<p>I would hardly call undergraduate journalism at Northwestern “vocational.” </p>
<p>About 3/4 of the classes Medill students take are outside of journalism, which makes it easy to double major in political science, economics, etc. A journalism degree from Northwestern won’t pigeon-hole anyone. It provides students with the broad base of knowledge necessary to be a good journalist.</p>
<p>Also, obviously news is changing, and newspapers are dying. But I think it’s a little bit far-fetched to argue that there will soon be no need for journalism. People still need and want reliable news, and some idiot with a blog is hardly going to take over the media’s role as a “watchdog.”</p>
<p>That said, I still think Stanford is a great option, even if you want to be a journalist. I just don’t think it’s fair to completely discount a j-school as highly-regarded and well-respected as Northwestern’s.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This remains to be seen, but you misconstrued the argument. My point is that there is no need for a potential journalist to get a journalism degree. Very few journalists actually have them. All things being equal, the NY Times or Wall St. Journal will be more likely to hire an HYPS grad than a Northwestern (Medill) grad. Just look up where their top reporters attended college.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the insights about journalism, which is definitely a field I’m interested in. </p>
<p>But I was also thinking about going to law school. I guess I should have mentioned that in my original post…</p>
<p>Go to Stanford, don’t be silly.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So did you actually look them up to make this claim?
David Barstow, Elisabeth Bumiller, Krishnan M. Anantharaman, John J. Edwards, Jonathan Eig, Gail Griffin… went to Medill. Which NYT/WSJ reporter(s)/editor(s) went to Stanford?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>For starters: Felicity Barringer (chief environmental correspondent, NYT), Aljean Harmetz (film correspondent, NYT), Glenn Kramon (business editor, NYT), Neil MacFarquhar (United Nations bureau chief, NYT), Gerry Shih (reporter, NYT), Philip Taubman (former Washington D.C. bureau chief, NYT) and the late Daniel Pearl (foreign correspondent, WSJ). Other notable Stanford alumni in newspaper journalism include: John Arthur (executive editor, LA Times), Doyle McManus (Washington D.C. bureau chief, LA Times), Christopher Reynolds (reporter, LA Times), Claire Spiegel (editor and reporter, LA Times), Joel Stein (columnist, LA Times) and Rajiv Chandrasekaran (editor, Washington Post).</p>
<p>Due to self-selection, it’s conceivable that Northwestern (Medill) grads may be more highly represented in newspaper journalism than Stanford grads. Nonetheless, I still stand by what I said earlier: “All things being equal, the NY Times or Wall St. Journal will be more likely to hire an HYPS grad than a Northwestern (Medill) grad.” It is because, given the undergraduate journalism degree offered at Northwestern (Medill), the latter is much more likely to seek employment in the newspaper industry than the former. The two propositions (namely, higher representation but lower likelihood to be hired) are not logically inconsistent.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>HYPS are by far the most highly represented undergraduate institutions at HYS law schools. For example, despite the fact the Stanford Law School is a top 3 law school in its own right, there are between four and five times as many Stanford grads as Northwestern grads at Yale Law School:</p>
<p>[Yale</a> Law School undergraduate representation](<a href=“Yale Law School undergraduate representation Forum - Top Law Schools”>Yale Law School undergraduate representation Forum - Top Law Schools)</p>
<p>Assuming that Northwestern students are no less interested than Stanford students in applying to YLS, it’s safe to say that the acceptance rate for Stanford students is approximately four-and-a-half times higher than that for Northwestern students.</p>
<p>I’m planning to go to Law School after college too! I think I saw a statistic somewhere that said like 5 or 10 percent of Medill graduates go to Law School, actually, and I know I’ve read that top j-schools prepare people well for Law School. Of course, Stanford clearly prepares students for Law School quite impressively, too :P</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Leaving aside the fact that I can name at least a dozen NU classmates who are at those particular newspapers, are you under the impression that those are the only newspapers in the country or something?</p>
<p>iamtbh, honestly, everyone knows you’re a college freshman. You don’t have a clue what employers do and don’t do.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Hiring patterns at the NY Times and Wall St. Journal have substantially changed since the 1970’s & '80’s.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No, of course not. The Washington Post and LA Times matter as well.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I am fairly certain that most employers (or at least the successful ones) don’t hang around college discussion websites to gratuitously and pedantically lecture (not to mention, bore) lowly college freshmen in their own school’s internet forum. But maybe business has been slow for you lately?</p>
<p>Well, that you wrote the following shows how much you don’t know:
The Medill experience/training is vastly different from what one can get at Stanford. Every Medill student has a residency requirement and the connections you get as a Medill student will be different. There’s no such thing as “all things being equal” and it’s silly to even mention it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Oh, please enlighten me. Pretty please.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Let me restate my position: “My point is that there is no need for a potential journalist to get a journalism degree.” This makes the Medill “experience/training” and “residency requirement,” etc. trivial and superfluous. If you think about it, the term “residency requirement” is quite a misnomer. Normally, when we use the term, we mean something that needs to be fulfilled in order to reach a certain goal. For example, a future doctor needs to fulfill his or her residency requirement in order to become a doctor. Or, a potential state resident needs to fulfill his or her residency requirement in order to become a state resident. And so on. But this is not the case with journalism. A budding journalist does NOT need to fulfill his or her “residency requirement” in order to become a journalist. It’s not actually a real “requirement” at all. The overwhelming majority of journalists do not have journalism degrees, let alone any “residency requirements.” So what makes you think that this “residency requirement” (or for that matter, the journalism degree itself) makes things NOT equal?</p>
<p>The great thing is, iambth, is that with the kind of consulting I do, I can set my own hours and choose only the clients I want. Ah, the definition of success!</p>
<p>You’re just being gratuitously nasty. You don’t know anything in the least about journalism or Medill. Which is fine. You don’t need to. But don’t pretend you do when you don’t.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I reiterate: “most employers (or at least the successful ones) don’t hang around college discussion websites to gratuitously and pedantically lecture (not to mention, bore) lowly college freshmen in their own school’s internet forum.”</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I know it’s a “dead man walking.”</p>
<p>
Does “work experience” ring the bell? Thanks for missing the point and spending a whole paragraph explaining to yourself how journalism degree isn’t required (we all know that already, duh!)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No, I didn’t miss your point. I just thought it was so blatantly obvious that I need not bother with it. But for your sake, let me address it now. Of course, work experience matters. So do other factors such as general intelligence and basic writing skills. My argument has always been that you don’t need to to go to an undergraduate journalism school to acquire journalistic work experience. You could say that at Medill, the journalistic work experience is part of the “academic” curriculum. Well, that is precisely what makes it vocational training. I personally do not believe that vocational training has any place in undergraduate education, but apparently Northwestern does. Which is why I asked the OP the following questions: “Do you want to go to college to learn how to think for yourself? To learn new and exciting ideas which can be applicable to all fields? Or, do you want to be taught a (limited and obsolete) vocational trade?”</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My 3 year old nephew says this a lot. Generally, this is because toddlers at their stage of cognitive development, have trouble expressing themselves in an articulate and logical manner.</p>