No. I decided by my senior year that my exposure to the print journalism industry was so thorough that I had enough knowledge of the process to know I didn’t want to do it. I knew I wanted to write feature stories in magazines and you can’t just start there - you have to cover city council meetings and boring newspaper stories first - so I decided to focus on getting my own Web development company started.
It’s been 16 years since I graduated and 17 years since I started my Web company and it’s doing ok. I think my journalism education has still treated me well for making me a well-rounded individual (KSU makes you take a varied courseload for journalism, not just writing), being a great communicator and listener, and keeping me interested in the news of the world around me.
Funny enough, I’m about to run for city council. The very thing that bored me out of pursuing journalism in the first place!
Wow. Two bushels of popcorn coming your way! (You’ll need the energy.)
I think a journalism education is a fabulous foundation for good writing, good communication skills (if you can get anyone to READ the words you so laboriously arranged :rolleyes: ), clear thinking, analytical skills, and – very important – being aware of an audience. Hell, I’d vote for you! Best of luck.
Come back and comment when you’ve watched the documentary. I’m very interested in your thoughts.
I watched the documentary. It was good! Nice to see the real reporters and Ben Bradlee. Also to see the people involved in Watergate just sitting there talking plainly about it.
I had read the Wikipedia article on Watergate but this definitely brought it more to life. I really like Redford’s respect for Woodward & Bernstein, too.
What’s up with Ben Stein being so broken up about Nixon resigning, and asserting that he was not involved??
I thought you’d like it! I agree that it brings the story to life. It’s a great wrap-up. Can you believe that interview with David Frost where Nixon still denies he had anything to do with the cover-up? Like O.J. Simpson, he believes his own lies.
I was required to watch two movies in journalism school: All the President’s Men
and Absence of Malice
All the President’s Men was a lesson in sourcing, attribution, and fact-checking/verification. Although the technology is now obviously wildly different (ugh, drafts on typewriters! I always flash back to freshman year in college before all the journo classes had PCs), the information gathering techniques are the same. That shot of the phone books makes me shudder because what took Woodward and Bernstein probably days to compile could be done now in a few seconds on Google. Things go much quicker now, which is what has enabled the 24/7/365 news cycle.
*Absence of Malice *I had to watch in my Communication Law class. That one was a lesson on privacy law. Wilford Brimley lays out privacy law succinctly in the last few minutes of the movie. That one had Sally Field and Paul Newman and was also a really cool movie.
The other journalism movie I love is The Paper (Michael Keaton, Marisa Tomei, Robert Duval… a youngish Jason Alexander, Glenn Close… Fantastic, hilarious movie – great cameo with Spalding Gray). There’s a scene where a young photog gets sent to a perp walk to get pix of some kids accused of a crime – it’s the big story of the day if she can get the photos. She gets jostled around and basically flubs her shoot and races back to the newsroom to see if she got anything the paper can use. Anything at all. She slaps her little proof sheet down on the light table, slaps her loupe on top of it, looks up at the ceiling, utters a little prayer. And as she drags the loupe from one thumbnail to the next, she’s muttering, “I’m so fired. I. Am. So. Fucking. Fired.” And then, there it is, right there. In the corner, as she was falling, she caught a perfectly focused shot of the two kids’ faces. A little creative cropping and she’s got her first above-the-fold front-page, huge-story photo. She runs out to the newsroom and to no one, she shouts, “I GOT IT!!!” I cry tears of joy with her every single time I see that because I know just *exactly *how that feels, to get that story or interview or photo that your editor is counting on… Hits me right in the feels.
And another one, sort of, is the Drew Barrymore romcom Never Been Kissed, which I thought was hilarious for imagining that a big-city newspaper copy editor would get a private office with a window and a nice view of the city, and a secretary/personal assistant.
