Occasionally, people ask me for advice on how to be a journalist. As someone who literally started from square one (I didn’t know anyone who worked as a journalist before I decided to be one—most of the people I knew growing up worked in factories or in clerical jobs) I’ve thought about this more than most people. But there are a lot of paths into journalism—what worked for me probably won’t do it for you.
The shortest answer that I can give is that journalism is a made-up profession, with all the good and the bad that that entails. Unless you have fantastic social connections, the only way that you can start doing journalism is to just do it. Yes, there are internships, but even the ones that don’t pay want writing samples.
So: start looking at the world around you and trying to turn it into stories. Go to a city meeting, take notes on what’s happening, and turn that into something that your neighbors might want to read. Or start with a question, and describe your process of looking for the answer.
Don’t be too precious about what you’re doing. Whenever you get bogged down, think about what information you have learned that might actually help people understand something new about their community. Your inimitable style and deathless prose will come later—it will likely creep its way in without you even noticing.
Look for places that might publish your writing and reach out to them. If no one responds to you just go ahead and make up your own publication (more on that below). Try to see everyone you meet during the process of figuring out what the hell it is your doing as a potential collaborator, instead of competition.
At many points as you do this, people will tell you that journalism is awful—that it is underpaid, that it is emotionally exhausting, that it’s a dying profession. They’re not wrong. But they’re not exactly right either. The mere act of learning how to report out a story—figuring out what questions to ask, figuring out who you need to talk to and where you need to go, figuring out how to turn the cyclone of information in your head into something that another person will want to read, figuring out how to have a good working relationship with an editor, figuring out how to not waste your time—is immensely valuable in its own right.
Here are a few resources for the extremely-new-to-this journalist that I am especially fond of:
Longform interview with J. Wortham
The Longform podcast is a great resource for getting a lot of perspectives on how people get into journalism, but very few interviewees break down the individual discrete steps as well as J. Wortham.
Ostensibly a resource for science journalists, this is the single greatest collection of journalism tutorials I’ve found in a one place on the Internet. And they have mentoring programs!
A resource for anyone interested in podcasting, or any kind of audio journalism. You may be particularly interested in the gear guides (just don’t let yourself get intimidated if you can’t afford the gear they recommend right away) and their Starting Out series.
Robert Krulwich’s Commencement Address at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism
More the advice that I would give to someone looking to get into journalism than someone who had just paid for two years of getting educated in it, but a great speech nonetheless. If you start to get restless, skip ahead to around the 14 minute mark.