It's the start of another new year

Thoughts on majoring in journalism for the first week of the semester

It’s Tuesday morning as I write this. Yesterday was the first day of classes for my 16 new graduate students in our online master’s programs in sports journalism and digital journalism at St. Bonaventure, the continuation of studies for the rest of our students. 

If you’re teaching, it was probably your first day too and I hope that all of your students read the syllabus. 

Man, I love the first day of school.

But this is an interesting time to be teaching journalism. Y’all know the state of the industry right now, so we don’t need that specific nut graph. Given all that, there’s a sense from some people I’ve seen posting online and on social media that there’s no way to morally justify encouraging a young person to pay to study journalism in college¹.

Let’s establish right from the jump that I pay my mortgage and feed my family by teaching journalism and running journalism programs, so of course I’m biased here. No sense in pretending otherwise, so take everything I have to say here with that in mind: 

Let’s start with a book I go back to often, George Vecsey’s memoir A Year in the Sun: 

When I talk to journalism classes, I always say: Consider your options; think about law, advertising, business, publishing, teaching, public relations; there are not many good jobs in the newspaper business.

Vecsey wrote that in 1989. Smack in the middle of the last golden age of American journalism. 

In his must-read weekly newsletter,

Will Leitch

shared a speech in which he talked about how students entering journalism school are told that this is a bad time to try to find a job in journalism:

This is exactly what these type of people were saying to me when I entered journalism school 30 years ago, and, as my professors informed me back then, was exactly what these type of people were saying to them 30 years earlier.

This isn’t to dismiss the underlying concern. It’s imperative that we are honest with our students about what’s going on in the industry. No use sugarcoating it or filling them with false hope or optimism. Things are rough out there. But it is meant to point out that history sure does rhyme a lot, and that journalism has always been a challenging industry in which to make a good living.

There’s always been a tension within the industry about whether journalism school is necessary. One of the things that makes journalism unique as a profession is that there are no formal requirements. It’s not like being a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, where you have to go to school to learn and earn the credentials needed to do the job. I’ll be the first to say that I learned more about journalism interning Friday nights on the sports desk at The Times Herald than I did in many of my journalism classes at St. Bonaventure. 

But those classes still had value, and I think they still do today. No, you don’t need a degree to do this, but I think there’s still value in journalism school.

Taken by someone at SUNY Oswego when I taught there. I don’t know I’m doing with my body here either.

For one thing, college gives students a safe place to practice and make mistakes. 

Yes, anyone can start being a journalist right this moment. But I’ll always believe there’s value in having a space to learn, to practice, and to make monumental mistakes. A royal screwup writing at a job or online can cost you your job, your reputation, your career. A royal screwup in class gets you one bad grade.

Let’s broaden this out a bit. Embedded in the “don’t major in journalism” argument is the premise that college exists solely for economic means. You go to college to get a job to make a lot of money. Period. I get that idea. Certainly, with the cost of college and the crushing nature of student loan debt, I can’t fault anyone for looking for a return on that investment. 

At the same time, the idealistic side of me cringes at this. Because life is about more than your job and your salary. A college education should be about more than getting a decent job. At its best, a college education should open new worlds to you. You read things you wouldn’t normally read, start to see the world in a different way and learn how to be curious and inquire about the world. 

To reduce college, and life, to a steady job just feels so limiting. It feels antithetical to those first day of school vibes, when it’s all promise and possibility. 

Let’s go back to Will Leitch for a second: 

I often hear from undergraduates who are majoring in journalism or the arts who ask me how to help justify their major to their parents. I tell them, as a parent myself, that I absolutely understand being worried about the future career prospects of my children. But much more than I worry about that—I worry about them being happy. I want them to be interesting. I want them to feel alive. Sure, they could (maybe) make more money sitting in a corporate office and sorting through excel spreadsheets all day under deadening fluorescent lighting, but what’s the fun in that? That’s boring! Your parents want you to be happy, and they want a cool story to tell. There’s a million corporate lawyers. How cool is it that Becky’s kid is covering the Olympics in France right now? Or on the campaign trail? Or on a movie set? Or on book tour?

Let’s bring this back to journalism.

For me it comes down to this: There has never been a more important time to be good at what we do. 

I’ve been saying this for eight years now, because it feels like Trump’s candidacy and presidency broke something in our culture and our media. One of the reasons objectivity became a journalistic norm is the belief that people can disagree on issues and that readers should be presented with all sides to make informed decisions about who to vote for, how to spend their money, etc. One of the foundational beliefs of a free press is that sunshine is the best disinfectant, that reporting on the truth can bring down a corrupt president. 

This all sounds hopelessly naive now, doesn’t it? Add to this the financial issues the industry has faced, the perceived looming AI threat, and it does feel like something is broken. There are real problems, real issues. It can be easy and tempting for the tenured white guy to brush these off. If you’ve been laid off from your newspaper in the past year, you’ve understandably got strong feelings about the industry. If you’re facing near five figures of student-loan debt, I get the trepidation.

We need to be honest with our students and ourselves about the state of the industry.

And yet … 

There’s still a high school soccer game that is going to be played tomorrow night that gets a write up. There are proposed zoning changes in a village that need to be reported on. There are a thousand stories, big and small, that are going to inform readers, make them laugh, make them mad, or just give them something to read. Somebody’s going to have to write them. 

Journalism, the action, still matters. There’s never been a more important time to be good at what we do.

Which means there’s never been a more important time to teach people - young and old - how to do what we do.

1. This may be a bit of a straw man argument, as I couldn’t easily find a specific example of this. But I’m confident in the vibes.