PressEthic

We're always told journalism is a dues-paying profession. Start at a smaller publication as a fact checker, intern, maybe even, yes, a coffee fetcher. But eventually move on.

It might not ever occur to us that the our bosses won't be crazy about that idea.

There are some interesting points here about the small town vs. big city journalism - like whether being a small-town reporter means never investigating your neighbors, which I tend to doubt. But underneath them is what may or may not get us jobs:

"A lot of community newspapers end up with people who really don't care about the community they're in," he says.

If we as graduate students here at NYU wanted to write for our hometown, 20,000-circulation dailies, we probably wouldn't have come here in the first place. If we get our degrees and go to those papers to gain more experience, we run the risk of being those students Randy Hammer thinks are just biding time. And maybe we would be.

Maybe we'd genuinely care that new parking meters are being installed downtown. If not, as the dedicated young scribes we've become, we'd write the story anyway. Does that mean we shouldn't have the job at all? It's unfair to assume that anyone who works or studies journalism in a metropolitan area is elitist. Theoretically, we want good clips, so we'll do good work.

This article is a little old, but worth reading. Going into journalism for the money is like going into accounting for the fame; no one does it. But the rent needs paid. This article suggests that young journalists aren't willing to take these jobs, and the CBS piece says these newspapers aren't willing to give them to us.

If we need experience to get more experience, how do we find that first stepping stone?