The Carnival of Journalism Returns

• Ideally experience at a college media organization would help a student learn relevant skills for the workforce and help students land a job.
• If you work at a news organization, what kinds of skills do you and your organization look for in new hires?
• What kind of “clips” should college students have by graduation?
• You can approach this as your advice to college media organizations or as if you were a theoretical adviser or manager of a student news organization. Or as a theoretical employer imagining the ideal experience a just-graduated student should have gotten.

It’s funny because a very similar discussion has been ensuing on Linkedin, and I have found it to be the height of predictable banality.

Having taught at (and been thrown out of, pretty much a full-time faculty’s request) both The Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and NYU’s Journalism School – and each year hiring a number of graduates of J Schools around the country, I feel somewhat (somewhat) qualified to try and answer the question.

I should preface this by saying that I used to start my class at NYU each year (and in the end I had 350 students) by telling the students on the first day to go to the bursar’s office, get their money back, go buy a video camera and a laptop and get on a plane – then call me in a year or two.

Much better way to learn, IMHO.

Of course, before there ever were Journalism Schools, that is exactly how people learned journalism – they simply did it. They hooked up with some newspaper, got paid next to nothing and went to work, making mistakes along the way, but figuring it out – or not.

I am much more a fan of doing and learning by trial and error than classroom lectures and theory.

So that having been said, I would limit my remarks here to the last part of the question:  As a theoretical employer imagining the experiences a just-graduated student should have gotten.

As a not theoretical but real (that means that there is real money being spent here) employer let me say that the very first thing I do with any new hires is to put them through a very intensive training program that I conduct myself.  And the very first thing I tell them is to forget everything they have learned so far – it’s generally pretty much wrong to begin with and about 95% of it is pretty worthless for what they have to do for me anyway.

And what they have to do is to make product.

They have to take a camera and a laptop, which we give them, and go out and make content for our shows.

That’s the job.

And they will live and die based on what is on the screen. Nothing more, nothing less.

No viewer cares about anything else and I certainly don’t.

So this is not all that different from the old school newspaper way of learning.

I am more than happy to work with them for the first few months, rounding out the bumps and bluntly critiquing (with an emphasis on bluntly) their work.  I always tell them, ‘if you are looking for praise, show it to your mother’.

But in time they can get pretty good.

My philosophy is fairly simple.

Here’s the camera.

There’s the door.

If you can come back with a great story, we are in business.

If you can’t, you should find another line of work.

This has worked quite well for me for the past 25 years.

At least in the real world.

At the University level, as I said, I keep getting thrown out.

Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2013