I’ve been working at The Daily Collegian, Penn State’s independently-run student newspaper, for five semesters now, just over two years. Until this semester, I have always been a reporter.
I still remember my first story. A student group concerned about animal rights was petitioning the Penn State dining commons to switch over to cage-free eggs.
To be polite, it’s not my best article.
And that’s the thing with journalism: it takes practice. Since that first article, I have grown exponentially as a reporter and writer, going so far as to write in-depth pieces last semester.
I’ve talked with students who are trying to make a difference by making the campus a little more green. I’ve talked to Iraq War veterans returning to Penn State. I made the two hour trip to visit Shanksville a couple days before the Sept. 11 anniversary last year. I’ve talked with professors whose only hope is for a day when young people will understand the importance of voting. And I’ve even been so lucky as to interview Valerie Plame Wilson and Barack Obama.
These experiences could not have happened in the confines of the classroom and I have, by far, learned more from my Collegian experience than all my journalism classes combined. I’m sure many young journalists have experienced much of the same.
The blame for this lack of classroom education? It doesn’t fall entirely on the J-schools. Penn State could do a better job by requiring fewer theory classes and more reporting classes (which would, in a perfect world, combine multimedia reporting as well as print).
But part of the blame falls on the students themselves. Sitting in my upper-level news reporting class, two students rudely type away on their computers while the professor talks about the importance of leads. One is playing a card game online, the other is checking her friends’ AIM statuses. The typing and mouse clicking are so loud that I have trouble concentrating on what the professor is saying.
Luckily, I know what goes into lead writing, but most of the other students in the room haven’t written a lead for a year, maybe more, since they took the lower-level reporting class.
I faced a similar situation while in my copy editing class last fall. At the end of the semester, we had a group project where we edited stories and placed them on a front page layout in Quark, complete with photos. Despite the professor’s excellent teaching skills that harped on AP style for a number of common items, I was left substantially editing the other student’s copy.
$10,000,000.
Um, no.
$10 million.
Sacramento, CA
Nope.
Sacramento, Calif.
These are the very basics of editing, and the essentials that any reporter should know by heart from the AP Stylebook.
You can’t learn journalism in a vacuum, or a classroom for that matter and a semester’s worth of reporting or editing is quickly forgotten. While not everyone can write for the student newspaper on campus, everyone should tryout. So what if you don’t make it? You can try again the next semester and editors will look highly on your determination.
You have to be your own advocate in today’s journalism industry and the best way to start down that path is to join the student newspaper. It’s the best prerequisite not only for your journalism classes, but also for your future career.
This is nothing new…
Katherine, you’re saying the same thing I said when I was taking j-courses 28 years ago in college. One prof asked how many in a class of 15 had written for the school newspaper. He was shocked to learn that only two of us had. And that newspaper, a weekly, was always looking for new writers, so any one of the students could have been writing for print (and clips) if they had a modicum of talent.
The experience I got working on the high school and college paper and interning at a weekly in Chicago made all the difference in the world when I got a job. I learned more working on the paper than I ever learned in class. And as a bonus, on production night at the college weekly, we got free food in a trade-out with an advertiser. What college student would turn that down?
– The Deadline Guy
Thank God for students like you, or professionals like me would truly despair. I was a guest lecturer at a local university (talking to a p.r. class about working with the media). One student was texting nearly the whole class, and it wasn’t even “secret texting,” it was blatant, above-the-desk, in-my-face texting. I’m still trying to come up with the good one liner for that situation.
Anyway, your point is dead on. It doesn’t matter whether you end up in p.r., magazine journalism, broadcast journalism, print or online: You need the basics of good writing, grammar, reporting and storytelling.
Persevere.
I have to tell you, it’s depressing how many real-world reporters don’t know AP style very well. If you do decide to go down the editing path and you start out at a small- to mid-sized newspaper like I did, you’ll encounter many, many reporters who majored in something other than journalism and never had AP drilled into their heads like we did at the Collegian/in some PSU classes, or the reporters simply don’t care and believe it’s the copy editor’s job to look that stuff up.
Unfortunately, between layoffs and “universal desks,” we simply don’t have time to catch every single grammar or AP error. You’re right, reporters seriously need to learn this stuff first.