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Hey all you journalists, I wanna hear stories about how you started

05:55 / 18.11.03

That jounalism ma thing got alotta responses, and I'm wondering if any of you would go into more details about how you got into the business, what made you get out, good things, bad thing, stuff like that.

15:26 / 18.11.03

Well, my dad ran the Daily Telegraph.

OK, no, not really, but for a while the editor of the Daily Mirror was a frequent house guest. My father, he got swept up in one of the old National Enquirer's frequent dragnets for British (including Commonwealth) reporters. After a few years, he quit the Enquirer and went freelance, but was still hooked into the social network. It's a turbulent business, people getting fired or promoted or busted or transferred at the drop of a hat. So, he golfed with a temperamental Australian, former Enquirer reporter, who got a job editing the Sun (the American one, with Nostradamus, not the British one, with the naked ladies) after the former editor of the Daily Mirror got fired/quit from the Sun and went back to editing the Daily Mirror. Or maybe the Sunday Mirror. Anyway, after getting out of school, I'd been working with Dad, then on my own as a freelancer and the Sun had an opening for a writer. So I went for a two week tryout (customary) and wrote the style well enough (and submitted enough useful leads) to get hired.

The keys seem to be knowing how to write the spare style (utterly unlike the above paragraph), and being able to find good leads. Barbelith is occasionally a good source of Sun leads, especially in the Laboratory. Weird science & freakish discoveries.
Anyway, I think those two things - style and leads - are key to all sorts of journalistic enterprises, not just silly tabloids like this one.

How you get that two-week tryout is up to you, though. That takes luck, I guess.

19:01 / 18.11.03

Holy cow! Your dad edited the Sun? That's gotta be the coolest thing I've heard all week! Tell me all about it.

20:59 / 18.11.03

Jesus, his name wasn't McKenzie, was it?

Doctor Singapore

01:05 / 06.12.03

OK, I'll bite...
Step 1-convince yourself that journalism is a noble profession and a public trust. This will come in very important later when you find yourself interviewing the authoress of a series of Amish romance novels (I wish I were making that up...)
2-go to college, get a bachelor's degree and (very important) write for the college newspaper. I majored in English Lit. because that's what I love. On the other hand, communications seems to be the fast-track degree as far as some employers are concerned.
3-With your B.A. and accumulated clips from the college rag, you can try to convince someone to hire you. I did, after about a year and a half. Sure, it's a small weekly paper in the sticks, and half each issue is devoted to high school sports, but that's called "paying your dues" -- which is what I'll be doing for the next couple years. Once you've shown you can hack it that long, you stand a chance of getting hired by a "real" paper. I'll let you know when it happens. In the meantime, I am getting paid for something I enjoy doing, so I

There is a better, faster way: Attend an Ivy League (Oxbridge?) school, and apply for and get accepted to one or more summer internships with prestigous news outlets, and ingratiate yourself enough to get said trial period upon graduation. I didn't do it that way, but it wasn't for want of trying--all down the line.

If you can spend some time practicing a)taking pictures, b) composing documents with Adobe/Quark or c) making web pages, those are pluses.

Oh, and no potential employer I've ever encountered considered any writing done for "alternative", "non-commercial", etc. media outlets (e.g. Indy Media, blogs, friend's webzines, etc.) to count as work experience. Sorry. The only exception I'm aware of is broadcast media, where community access TV, college radio, etc, are one of the few ways to get skills and training to begin with.

Journalism MA? I considered it...might be the way to go if you're determined to work for the Times (London or NY, take your pick)...but only because I was having a long slog to find a reporting job at the time. Think of it this way: Working for a small town newspaper means THEY'RE paying YOU to develop your skills...a much better deal.

Gotta go...late for office Xmas party.

03:04 / 06.12.03

grant, do you have an exceptoionally attractive sister who attended glasgow university a few years ago?

14:50 / 07.12.03

I did a philosophy masters with the plan of teaching at uni... after experiencing the masters, this seemed like a really bad idea, so I came out of uni with very little in the way of useful job-related skills.
Saw an ad for journalism & radio training, did the course, worked briefly at the beeb on work experience [hated it, hellhole, hellhole, Anne Diamond ugh, met the Fridge though] and took any voluntary writing assignments that came up. Got a job on one of the papers I'd volunteered on and ended up editing it, and later also trained other young journos.
Now I run me own business - at 30, it seems like a lot happened in a few years.

Dr Singapore is definitely right about the college newspaper, as it's contacts galore and, most importantly, portfolio fodder. Get published, no matter what. Degrees are meaningless [just so long as you have one, unless you get on an NCTJ course/local paper straight from 6th form] it's what you've done and what you bring to the table that counts. Ideally, you should be willing to do anything, work hard and work all hours, because if you don't want to, someone else will, and for less money.

Last week I was in a wheelie bin with my camera, for example.

14:52 / 07.12.03

One other thing. Apparently being an arrogant bastard helps.
This is what the person who employed me said anyway....