Advice For Young Journalists

~ Laura

Felix Salmon has some pretty dire news about journalism and the prospects for young journalists.

If all you care about is the great journalism, then, well, go out and find great stories to tell, and tell those stories in a compelling manner. You’ll always be able to find somewhere willing to publish them, even if they pay little or nothing for the privilege of doing so.

On the other hand, if you’re more career-oriented, and want a good chance at a well-paid middle-class lifestyle down the road, I don’t really know what to tell you. Except that the chances of getting there, if you enter the journalism profession today, have probably never been lower.

Ezra Klein says that journalism is still a viable career choice is one works hard and specializes.

Learn things about things. Pretty much everybody in journalism can write. The fact that you can also write probably won’t set you far apart. But not everyone in journalism can understand policy, or interpret the minutes from the Fed’s most recent meeting, or use the C-SPAN archives, or make a good graph. Try to figure out what your particular interests and/or skills are. Then work to make those competitive advantages. Subject area expertise is wildly undervalued in journalism, but it’s what makes the best journalists.

 

Published by Laura

29 thoughts on “Advice For Young Journalists”

  1. We have a Journalism school where I teach — but honestly I don’t think anyone who finishes the degree becomes a journalist. We have a pretty strong tourist industry in our area, so I think most of them actually go into marketing, public relations to some degree, etc. There’s something called ‘social media marketing’ that seems to be hot. I suspect a lot of them go into that. (I imagine if you’re an actual journalist than writing tweets for a living might prove frustrating.) I’m pretty sure that the Journalism degree is now being sold as ‘a flexible degree that you can do a lot of things with’. Kind of a come down if you thought you were going to be the next Walter Cronkite and instead you end up selling time shares. I’m waiting for someone to write this generation’s “Death of a Salesman”. It’s out there — in someone’s mind right now. Just hasn’t been written down and submitted.

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  2. Is there any job where the oldtimers aren’t saying “On the other hand, if you’re more career-oriented, and want a good chance at a well-paid middle-class lifestyle down the road, I don’t really know what to tell you”? I think even the computer guys are saying that. The super successful ones might say the lottery ticket of entrepreneurship is worth buying, and, some of them might say that they’re teaching a valuable skill (even if it’s not a guaranteed path to a well-paid middle class life), but I think the sentiment that there’s no clear path is pretty general.

    (And, I find that potentially more naive people hope that it’s that other career, over there, on the other side of the fence, that will offer that — that is, nurses think teachers might have a path, lawyers, think scientists, or doctors or CS, . . . .)

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    1. I’m a “computer guy”, and certainly wouldn’t go that far. I’ve seen two bubbles and one bust in my career, and would happily recommend software as a career with excellent middle-class prospects for any young person with the aptitude and interest, despite the warts.

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    2. I would still say to any young person what I would have said ten years ago: If you graduate from a Top 14 law school, you have a very good chance at an UMC income doing work that many people find moderately interesting. If you are thinking about a non-Top 14 law school, that is more of a crapshoot. Tell me your plan before I say whether it makes sense.

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      1. I used to say this too. Nowadays though, law school tuition is running $60k/year. I can’t in good conscience encourage anyone to go to law schools 6-14 at full price anymore.

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  5. I’d probably say the same 1-6 for law school — and how many people is that? Less than 10000, right? Which supports the generally issue of a winner take all society. But, at least you know when you get in whether you’ve been cast as a winner.

    Interesting to hear that you are still giving positive feedback on a CS degree. I’m inclined to think there’s going to be huge pressure on runoff the mill programming jobs, too, and, by run if the mill, I mean for folks who aren’t the 10000.

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    1. I think it’s more like 1500-1800 students admitted annually at the top 5 schools. The problem is really the tuition though, and less so the jobs.* There are lots of good legal jobs outside big law, and lots of big law jobs for people outside the top 5 schools. If you get a job that pays $75-$100k straight out of school, that’s pretty good – unless you had to borrow $200k+ in student loans. Then it’s pretty bad. There are lots of jobs in that pay range though in government, small law firms, corporate law departments at big companies etc. Big law pays close to double that though, which is a lot more comfortable to pay off the loans

      At the top 5 schools, pretty much everyone who wants a big law job can get one. Starting at NYU there’s a noticeable drop off. By the bottom of the top 14 it’s more like 50-60%. So suddenly it goes from being a lot of debt for a very good chance at a good job to a real gamble. If you can get into one school though, you can probably get a big scholarship to a somewhat lower ranked school. That’s what I’m really getting at. Law school at $60k/year is rarely a good idea, but at $30k (which it was about 10 years ago) it’s a much better proposition. Like y81 says, tell me your plan and I’ll tell you if I think it’s a good idea.

      *the overall legal job market has been pretty rough since 2008, with more graduates than jobs every year, but with declining law school enrollment it is getting a lot closer to balanced.

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      1. We don’t have a public law school in town, so there isn’t a cheap option for those who want to go work for the government or cops who want to try for promotion or whatever. It’s an issue that I worry about. However, I don’t think the whole problem is the tuition. For example, both assistant DA and public defender pay is here is low enough that I don’t understand why anybody with ability would take the job. Living expenses are lower than the coast, but they start below $40,000 for something that must be a 50-60/hour a week job.

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      2. I actually think there’s enough value add to a T14 law school, even past the top five, that I would advise someone to pay/borrow the money. Your whole life, having Cornell or Northwestern on your resume will get it onto the top of pile. On the other hand, if you can get a free ride at New York Law School, then it is probably a better bet than paying tuition at Fordham.

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      3. OK, T14 X 2000, 28,000 students who are going to get legal jobs.

        And, the government paid jobs, 40K for the 50-60 hour job? That sounds like the kind of deal that needs to be staffed by idealists (who burn out), temporary employees, who hope its a stepping stone, but I doubt that being a public defender is, though assistant DA might be, marginally qualified, or those willing to take the pay without doing the entire job (i.e. not really working the 50-60 hours the job requires, but who can blame them?).

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  6. Seems to me the whole job market is ratcheting down, not particularly evenly but across the board. If you went into radiology you are screwed because films can be read overnight in Oz or En Zed or Bangalore, but if you went into podiatry or pediatrics it’s not so bad because for that a practitioner has to be here. But now the kids doing premed will figure that into their calculations. Same with engineering, Ford was very proud that they had their engineering going on 24 hours because the Detroit team hands it off to the Oz team hands it off to the Germany team hands it back to Detroit, well that’s lovely but it means that 2/3 of the Ford engineering jobs are not in the US.

    My wife went to the second best law school in the country (AND when tuition was under five grand, that’s how old WE are) and it has been great for her. Her career has been a whole lot nicer than it would have been had she gone to Creighton. But at the time kids coming out of Creighton were getting decent jobs, and also discovery work involved actually reading the stuff and not having an e-discovery system which cut down the stuff needing to be read tenfold and let the reading be done by lawyers in, yes, Bangalore.

    Back to the Ezra advice, if you come into law school with knowledge of food science or chemistry or electrical engineering, you can probably come out even of Creighton and get a decent job in patent law. You also do and will need wills-and-divorces solo practitioners, but you can’t pay off 200 grand in loans on what they make.

    But I worry for the kids, they are coming into a job market in which a lot of the middle-middle and upper-middle occupations are either automated or can be offshored, and the graduates are competing much more vigorously for the places which do have prospects. Journalism is particularly devoured by events, but the rest of the middle class world is red of tooth and claw, too.

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    1. You don’t like Creighton or Obamacare? You’re dead to me.

      Also, at least for now, radiologists make about twice what a podiatrist or pediatrician make. I don’t know what that will lead to eventually as far as a reaction, but I wouldn’t be telling people to go into podiatry for the money. You have to love the foot.

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      1. What with an aging, heavy, diabetic, as well as sports injury-prone population, podiatry actually does sound like a good call. I see a lot of my podiatrist.

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      3. I was recently chatting with a podiatrist who mentioned having to be on call over the weekend. I don’t want to know what kind of gnarly foot emergencies on-call podiatrists have to deal with. There are occasions when I think “I am sooo in the wrong job”. Talking to a podiatrist is not one of those times.

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    2. The radiology profession keeps a pretty tight grip on numbers and can control how many radiologists are trained and licensed in the us. Breaking that market will require changes in their control of radiology. Say, in the case of radiology, those scans are read in Bangalore because the radiologists decide it’s ok (not Medicare, or hospital administrators). So they keep numbers low and bring on temp work to decrease workload when they need it.

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    1. I thought you were joking, but read comments on your piece and indeed you seem to have waded into a minefield! But, it seems to be one that’s right up your alley, with your past professional experience, and your current suburban mom/educational specialist (at least for your own kids).

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    2. I like the article. I don’t fully understand the reaction, but I try to not pay attention to anything at school when they talk about curriculum.

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    3. wow, people get weird with their comments….I thought your article was a well-thought-out summary of what is going on. I am failing to find anything in it that would generate such a reaction. Am I missing something? (and I’m a white suburban mom who isn’t thrilled with some aspects of common core…mostly the Kindergarten/First grade standards. I have no gripes with the standards at other grades.) I didn’t read anything you wrote that would make me upset! The internet is a strange, strange place.

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  8. I think it’s even more prudent than ever to be sure that your communication skills are top notch no matter what your field (writing, speaking/presenting, negotiating, etc.). And to think about having a few different streams of income.

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  9. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary for a lawyer is $131,990. Almost 600,000 people are employed as lawyers. http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes231011.htm

    More than 10,000 people (i.e., the graduates of the top 5 schools) are making a good living as lawyers.

    That, to me, would make a $60,000 per year investment in a legal degree a good deal, if the young lawyer is willing to pay off the student loans in a timely fashion. It would be a bad idea if 1) the student was not able to finish the degree, 2) was not temperamentally suited to legal work, 3) was not likely to pass the bar exam, or 3) had no idea how to create a budget.

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    1. But, the question is whether this is changing, for our children. I think, though, my point is that the skills are worth getting, but that they won’t be enough. I think our children are going to have to learn to take risks and sell themselves throughout their careers (and not just by doing a really good job at the tasks they’ve been assigned).

      I think there used to be (used to be, in the mythical post-war-pre now world) good > middle class jobs where others did most of the sales, where one could be an employee and not an entrepreneur, but that in the future, all the good jobs will be for entrepreneurs with good sales skills. I think middling professional workers are now facing the same challenges that working class people faced a few decades ago, when the steel mills and factories started closing down.

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      1. bj you said much more eloquently what I was trying to get at – that it is just as much about the soft skills/flexibility/nimbleness/self-promotion as it is about technical skills/which profession. The former can never replace the latter but the latter is no longer enough.

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