Should we lie to journalism students?

I had the same feeling when I got laid off/bought out. I had spent two years living in fear of losing my job and knowing I had no control over it that it made me hate my job. I had gotten a pseudo promotion three years earlier and it basically put a huge target on my back.

It's a shitty way to live and I don't miss that at all.

 

I agree. I was more addressing the misconception that you can climb your way up. They are better off taking an early shot at the big-time, and then getting out if they don't want to cover school board meetings from here to eternity.

 

Good post, Mizzou.

Threads like this make me sad. I had a grizzled, veteran sports writer give one of these "you need to be realistic about this business" talk when I was in college and it depressed the hell out of me for about three days. But I also realized, at some point, he was projecting his own failures as a sports writer onto our class, saying maybe the best we could ever hope for was working in Spokane, Washington. I had more success in my career by the time I was 23 than he did after 30 years in the business, so I'm sure as hell glad I didn't take that to heart. I don't say this to brag (because the majority of my friends make me feel like I've come up way short in my career), I just think if you go all Debbie Downer, a part of you is saying your own experiences will automatically be theirs. And they'll probably just resent you for it. They're not going to believe your path is going to resemble your own.

You know what else is a really difficult profession? The law. And sales. And medicine. And finance. And technology. And education. Acting. Stand-up comedy. Screenwriting. Architecture. Real estate. Owning a business. And on and on.

Life isn't really that much more miserable for journalists. We just know how to express ourselves better, and so we tend to blog about it or write about it more often. Don't you think there are plenty of lawyers who dreamed of arguing civil rights cases in front of the Supreme Court and instead end up working as the fourth ranking deputy district attorney who has 60 hour work weeks and a back logged case load that never feels manageable? Or doctors who wanted to be heart surgeons who end up working in the local ER to pay off massive med school debt, spend 15 years there and end up getting divorced at 43?

Life is kind of hard for everyone in the middle class. And if you didn't get your breaks and you got stuck in a situation you didn't love, it can be even shittier. Yes, the low pay and weekend hours of small town journalism suck. But I know people with magazine jobs who are miserable and lawyers making $170,000 a year who are miserable. How many middle managers out there make awful money and hate their jobs, but feel trapped by debt and family obligations? A ton. Is journalism any worse than working in one of those jobs? It depends on your personality and your opportunities.

I tell kids these days that the media industry is like anything else -- it's really hard to get ahead, even if you're super talented and super connected. And if you have to be prepared for that. The newspaper industry is slowly dying, but that doesn't mean journalism is dying. The landscapse is just shifting, and we don't exactly know where yet. You have to know how to market yourself, and you have to be bold enough to do it, because just doing good work is not enough. Your clips alone, no matter how good, will not get you your dream. And your talent, no matter how obvious, will not be enough either.

I disagree that you can't climb your way up, Dick. You might not do it the traditional way, but it's not like you have one shot and you should give up. But what you might need to do is pitch freelance magazine stories on the side, work on them at night and weekends, get less sleep sacrifice your romantic life. It's obvious that Jason McIntyre (aka The Big Lead) and I are not friends, nor do we like one another. But he took a big risk starting his own blog and he carved out a place for himself. He gambled and got what he wanted, recognizing a void newspapers would not fill. I admire that, even if I don't agree with some of the content or the choices he made. That's ok. It's not my life. He is a success story. I mean this sincerely when I say I do admire the self-made nature of it.

Bill Simmons made a similar choice. So did Will Leitch. Nate Silver wrote about politics in his spare time. All those guys had a major media company come along and buy their website/talent. Julie Powell wrote about cooking on a free Salon.com blog, and it became a major book deal and then a movie. All that hard work they put in gets overlooked frequently.

I think the message you should try to get across to kids is how hard you have to work in any job if you want to get to a place where you're happy. And you need to have a flexible spouse who will let you chase a dream if one comes up. Maybe some jobs are easier than others, sure. But for the most part, that's capitalism. If you want it bad enough, you have to take risks and sacrifice. The ones who don't have their heart in it will figure it out quickly enough that they don't want to live in Nowhereville, USA and make $24,000 at age 28, much less 38. They'll want more job security and they'll realize other things in life are a priority. And the ones who are determined to make it against all odds, no matter what obstacles are in front of them, will stick with it. At least until they become alcoholics.

Sometimes, the people who are really, really successful at their jobs are not people who have perfect marriages or perfect friendships. That's true in any industry. Sometimes those people find that balance later in life, after they've made it. There is no one-size-fits-all path for anyone anymore.

 

To be very clear, I guess my main point is that I wouldn't want them to think that they CAN'T get to the NYT right out of college. Because they can, and that's the best time to do it. I think that's encouraging to know, not discouraging.

 

Journalism students generally know exactly what they are getting into. They just overestimate their own abilities (most of them) and assume that how they feel at 20 will be how they feel at 30.

 

Chase your passion, but go in with eyes wide open. Journalism is rapidly-changing. There will always be a need for credible, trustworthy people who can get information out, and there will always be people willing to pay for it. We can't be William Jennings Bryan praying for America to stop its industrialization ... we can adapt, and the next generation is able to do that.

I'm trying to help steer them in that direction, but I do encourage them all to develop a fallback plan. I was burned out and out of journalism when I hit 31, and I was (and am) a journalism junkie.

 

How many young journos who want to be the next Bill Simmons or Chris Jones or Wright Thompson or Lee Jenkins right now -- just to name four young-ish journalists I assume most college journos dream of becoming -- are willing to do the work that would require? The reading, the obsessing, the writing and re-writing, the endless quest to get better and find better stories?

I would put the number at less than 2 percent. Even if you take talent out of the equation, I think only a select few want it bad enough.

Even Simmons, who I bet has inspired more bad writing than any journalist alive (from people who like his style mainly because they relate to it and think they could do it, even though they could not in most cases), is incredibly well read. (We can debate about how much of it he's absorbed, and whether he cares about accuracy, but the fact is, he's a voracious consumer of writing, and he works his ass off.) Most of the journalism students I come across think they'll just fire up a computer and start riffing off the game, and that their wacky insights will resonate with readers. I try to tell every single one of them, I seriously doubt you're reading enough. Novels, non-fiction, criticism, humor, politics, etc. They look at me like I'm crazy half the time. Who has time to read when there is Facebooking to be done?

The ones who do want it bad enough understand that it's a craft, even if you're a blogger. I believe the same stuff about Leitch.

 

I've had the same experience with many, many of them.

"I kind of think of my style is something of a cross between Chuck Klosterman and Deadspin."

 

That's the perfect summation of how too many of them think. I wonder how many of them have a clue about the eight years Klosterman spent in Fargo and Akron, writing Fargo Rock City in his spare time, reading every single book he could get his hands on.

 

I'd have a hard time figuring out what to tell students. I'm still having fun with my job (crime/courts) and the pay is decent for the area. I mean, where else can you go to bomb squad practice and play with the robot?

 

It's silly to say one will never get laid off if they are good. Look at how many very good journalists have been laid off in the last couple of years. I'm of the theory that the more money you make, the MORE likely you are to be laid off.

This is true in all kinds of industries, not just journalism.

 

I agree with much of what both Dick Whitman and DD wrote. Good stuff.
The thread title has gotten me thinking. In particular that word lie. To me, that runs contradictory to what the goal of any journalist should be striving to do: tell the truth. If students ask tough questions or express worry about the business, be honest with them. Whether it be your own observations or what you've been told or read about the business, tell them what you know. Yes, it might drive some of them away. But probably not all of them.
I remember losing my first newspaper job. I had started to get an uneasy feeling so I asked my boss straight up if my job was secure. He assured me that yes, absolutely, my job was secure. The next week I was kicked to the curb. It ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me. But 11+ years later I still remember that feeling: He LIED to me! A newspaper editor, of all people, shouldn't lie. Maybe I was holding him or this profession to too high of a standard, but to me truth is cornerstone and paramount in this business.