Struggling to make a living

I recently got the following question from a beginning journalist:

I have reached the point where a job in journalism in any capacity seems a hopeless dream. I cannot get anyone to hire me in any field, despite my college degree and experience. I'm getting to the point where I can just barely eat and pay my rent. Do you have any advice?

There is only one question you need to ask yourself: Do you HAVE to be a journalist?

If you DON'T absolutely, no-doubt-about-it, can't-live-any-other-way have to be a journalist, then you should start considering other careers. Pound for pound, a journalism career is more work, more aggravation, and less pay than almost anything else you can do. Really.

I spent my fair share of time sleeping on folks' couches when I was starting out, as, I'm sure, have many others. I've slept on my grandmother's couch, on my mother's couch, on my dad's couch, and on the couches of three friends that I can remember. (Quite possibly more couches are buried in my past, possibly under an alcoholic haze.)

If you're one of those people who HAS to be a journalist, then the worse things get, the happier you are (in a sick, twisted kind of way). You think of everything as material for the novels you're someday going to write, or as seasoning for your writers' voice.

I know journalists who are proud to have been fired from every paper they've worked for. Journalists in the mid-30s who are still just one paycheck or car breakdown away from being out on the street (again).

I know journalists who spend most of their working lives with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Granted, they're in other countries -- most of the ones here have renounced their evil ways, joined AA, and got nicotine patches. But how are you going to renounce your evil ways if you never had any in the first place? Right, right?

Now, it is possible to be a journalist and not lead a life filled with misery and dispair. I can't think of anyone like that right off, but I'm sure such things happen. But if you want to avoid a life of misery and dispair, then switching careers would significantly increase your odds. For example, I know some pretty happy teachers, archivists, engineers, and librarians.

If you do HAVE to be a journalist, then you'll get through it. You'll get a job stuffing envelopes or manning the help line for an insurance company so you can cover school board meetings at night, or you'll get a job teaching English in China so you can freelance articles about the economic changes over there. As a journalist, you'll probably live the most interesting life it's possible to lead.

And that, of course, is the curse as well as the joy of the profession.

Advice for public relations people pitching stories to me

The biggest problem is inappropriate pitches. I didn't do consumer finance -- I work for a trade publication, not a consumer magazine! The PR folks who send me consumer-oriented press releases, and then call and try to talk to me about them, to use up my time even further, don't bother to check. That's really annoying and makes me think worse of their agencies.

The next biggest problem is incomprehensible pitches. If I can't figure out what you're selling, I'll just hit the delete key right off.

If an unintelligible press release *has* to go out, the best PR people would put a few paragraphs of explanation addressed to me personally before attaching the press release -- so I wouldn't have to wade through it to figure out what the story was.

They'd say something like, "Maria, here's hot trend in wireless for you -- ESP-based communication networks. They're fast and secure, and work through psychics. We've got some customers and analysts for you to talk to, if you're interested." And then the press release would go on to say, "ESP Networks, Inc. has announced the release of Gobbelty 2.0, an end-to-end, user-focused, communication solution for the enterprise networking marketplace." Argh! Please, folks, can you stop using the world "solution"?

Finally, my last pet peeve is PR folks who are either lazy or overworked (it can be hard to tell which). Either way, it makes the company look really bad.

Say, someone promises to get me in touch with customers, company spokesmen, and analysts. And then I wait while my deadline comes and goes and the PR guy only responds to messages to say "I'm working on it."

Well, I get pissed off, their company is left out of the story (and the competition gets to say nasty things about them unchallenged) and I have to scramble to fill that space with something else. Not fun.

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I don't call the company for the next article, and I don't recommend them to colleagues as a good source. And that's the opposite of good PR.

Better to just tell me that you don't have the time to set it up, but that I can contact the parties involved directly.

How important is graduate school to new journalists?

I beginning journalist asked me this question:

I'm worried about getting a journalism job. Should I go to graduate school?

I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me on this, but, having been in a position to hire recent graduates in the past (and having faced this same question myself) I have to strongly vote against grad school.

I first left school in a similarly bad market, and I had to work my butt off to get started. But the experience you gain will be worth more than grad school ever will. Here's my advice: move to an area where you can get free or cheap rent, in a large metropolitan area if you can find it. Get a day job if you have to, doing whatever you can. And spend your evenings going out and covering every school board meeting, fire district gathering and library fundraiser you can get yourself assigned to. It doesn't matter how little they pay you, or how small the paper is. Keep pushing for meetings with area editors and keep asking for more assignments. Meanwhile, volunteer for the local journalism organizations. It gets your name out and lets you network, while at the same time improving your basic skills.

I can't stress this enough: the only requirement to be a journalist is persistence. Everything else can be fixed by the copy desk. Really. If you're ignorant, they can fix that (trust me, I've worked with plenty of ignorant reporters). The only thing they can't teach you on the job (or cover up for you) is persistence. With persistence, you'll get the quotes you need. You'll keep digging to get the meat of the story. When I was an editor, the worst reporters I had were the ones who gave up when a source didn't return the first phone call. I had reporters who didn't know what the inverted pyramid was. That takes a few minutes to fix, and a couple of assignments until they get the hang of it. I had reporters who didn't know you were supposed to write down quotes verbatim. They went back, and redid it. Problem solved.

But the reporters who were afraid to go up and ask a follow-up question, or who'd sit and stare at the telephone because they didn't know what to do next, or who kept coming back to me and saying that they couldn't find anything out -- those were the ones I had the most problems with.

If you go to grad school simply because you couldn't find a job (as opposed to improving a particular skill, say) that's a big red warning flag to me. After all, finding a job requires good networking skills, the ability to go up to a stranger and ask them for help, and, of course, persistence. Do I want to hire a reporter who can't do any of that? No.

And if you really can't force yourself to do any of that, then, while it's possible to have a journalism career, it won't be as successful or fulfilling as if you pursued a different line of work.

So get out there and start calling people, start hounding editors. Really. Only a really idiot editor prefers a polite, shy journalist who takes the first "no" for an answer. You don't have to be obnoxious about it. But be firm. And follow up, and follow up, and follow up again.

Think of it this way. Someday, you are going to write a really ground-breaking, monumental piece of journalism. (Otherwise, why are you in this profession?) If you don't do it, nobody will and the world will suffer. So getting you your first job is the most important thing for everybody. If you can believe that, you'll get your job. It's the same way that, when you believe that whatever story you're working on is the most important thing in the world, people will drop what you're doing to help you.