A master’s degree in journalism can help propel your career, but the degree itself won’t necessarily make you a good reporter. It should motivate you to want to become good, as well as communicate to people – potential employers – that you are serious about doing so.
A master’s degree teaches you theory behind journalism, which can include how to create better stories, but not necessarily just how to write them. To do that, use techniques found in previous posts and find a good mentor/editor to spiff up your stories. Grad school is discussions, case studies, research papers, and you end up reading about a book a week per class.
One of my favorite writers, Michael Lewis, rails against the usefulness of a J-school degree. And he is right . . . because he's Michael Lewis. On the other hand, another person who is right is Matt Brown, who said he couldn’t get a job in journalism until he had the master’s degree. After J-school he worked his way up and went on to become a foreign correspondent for a top-tier news agency (more on him in a future post).
An advanced degree is valuable to immerse yourself in the journalism-learning environment. If you majored in journalism as an undergrad and had a good class on media law, you may already have enough training. But I found at least three classes are helpful, and in this order:
1. Media law. You need to know your boundaries, and it’s comforting to know that you know your boundaries. You’ll also learn just how amazing the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is and how Supreme Court rulings over the years set prescient to protect people like you and me as well as allow the National Enquirer can get away with what it does. Discussions on Federal Communication Commission may seem out of left field or irrelevant when you're just trying to learn about reporting, but it’s helpful to know about the regulation of a nation’s airwave spectrum. Also, delivery systems (paper, web, chisel on clay tablet) change but the rules on publishing and libel still apply. When I was in grad school, blogging was the new thing and some students said our school should offer a major in the subject. Can you imagine how silly that would be today? It’s still just journalism and writing but with a different delivery system. Social media is the new delivery system today, but the same old media laws still apply. One other rant: people can talk about social media all they want, but much of it points back to content, and that is often a well-written news story. Others can pass around all the media they want too, but you’ll stand out if you are a good content creator.
2. Communication Theory. It may be kinda boring, but you’ll come across all kinds of scenarios from recent and long-past history that still apply today, even though some delivery systems are now different. Years later you may be surprised how some of these will apply to on-the-job scenarios.
3. Journalism/communication history. It’s helpful to know how this profession evolved along with advances in technology and human understanding. I wrote a paper on the history of black newspapers in the United States. One of the things I learned from this is that 150 years ago all newspapers were launched by a cause. There was no notion of objectivity. Each special interest group reported news that was of interest to them and they were not ashamed to say so – the women’s paper, the Negro paper, the Democrat, the Republican, etc… It’s an important lesson for today. And each of my classmates who did a different paper in this class came away with their own historical lessons that can teach us something today. My favorite part was presenting my paper and having classmates offer feedback, some even suggesting lessons from my own material that I hadn’t thought of.
Of course you might learn all this stuff just by reading books on journalism – I like the personalmba.com, which is a great reading list of subjects you'd encounter in business school. Still, I would rather tell someone I had an MBA than say, "I've read the 99 books on the personalmba reading list."
Yes you might have to sit through some boring discussions or hear professors whine about how much better the glory days were. I remember one professor lamenting that there was too much information out there now and it was better when we all had political discussions based on the same information as reported in the local daily newspaper and the big three network news broadcasts (yea right, as if they were reporting everything that was really out there). Overall, though, most professors at a decently rated J-school are helpful.
If you are considering applying, check out the ratings of different schools and weigh them with the cost to attend each. FYI, there are no Adventist universities that offer a master’s degree in journalism. If one claims to, please contact me first and I’ll offer you my perspective.
I don’t recommend going to grad school directly from undergrad. You need to take some work experience to grad school. It’s different than undergrad, when you’re still doing more learning of what’s out there.
If you go to school, save all your papers both electronically and in print. You may not look at them often, but you’ll be an expert in a certain area of journalism and you don’t want to forget the material years later.
List of schools here: http://journalismjobs.com/journalism_schools.cfm
No comments:
Post a Comment