question for writers/journos on ILE - did you study journalism or do a course?

It's good to know the nuts and bolts stuff that j-school teaches you, and more pro/am writers could use the discipline and rigor it tends to instill. That said, a full-on j-school indoctrination tends to groom you for working for a daily, which is to say that it tends to beat down anything distinctive or original or creative in your work, which actually makes you somewhat less suited for, say, an alt-weekly. As a woman I met at a newspaper conference put it, "J schools these days tend to turn out 25-year-olds who write like 50-year-olds."

Because of that, I eventually managed to pick up a freelance gig that wound up being a full-time position at a tech mag, and now that I'm freelance again, I'm starting to write for some fairly large Canadian pubs...slowly, but surely.

If you don't have any experience in the field at all, journalism courses can certainly help you learn all of the stuff you need to know in a hurry, and give you the focus required to meet your editor's needs. Not everyone has the luxury of just dinking around with it for years, like I did.

What the fuck?

Who died and made you boss?

Why should I care?

When's lunch?

I've considered going to school for a bit of a top-up, especially in some of the areas I have less experience with. It can't hurt.

Sorry, rant over.

But when I ended up at UCI, their station and newspaper were literally down the hall from each other, and what's more UCI had no journalism program as such -- it was pretty much 'can you write and do you have the time?' So I threw myself into things as a general entertainment writer but after a few articles thought to myself "Well, I like talking about music the most, why not just concentrate on that?" I started pitching more and more reviews of things I liked, and within a few months had built up enough record company contacts to pitch for and get a column that ran every week for about four years. Then I also discovered alt.music.alternative and another venue for just writing a lot...

I work with a dozen other people in the edit department here, and maybe one of them went to j-school, if I recall correctly. Of course, alt-weeklies are sort of like the Island of Misfit Toys: Most of us backed into it or aborted other ostensible careers cause we decided we liked this better.

It used to be you could do that at dailies too, but these days you gotta have the right profile, which usually includes a decent j-school and some substantial time at a smaller paper.

I dunno, it seems to me the main things you learn in j-school are technique and ethics. With the right breaks, some decent guidance, and, most of all, some talent and some smarts, you can pick those up with practical experience. And if you do good reporting and/or writing, a smart editor's not gonna care where you learned it.

xpost

That's a different issue, Hstencil. Have you talked to your employer about the fact that you don't have the dosh to lay down so that it might be reimbursed? Get 'em to write a cashier's cheque or something.

But in journalism class, I'd turn in a piece that I'd worked all night on, and I'd get it back and it would be full of red ink. You notice quirks and bad habits that other teachers don't bother to point out to you.

Then we also had a writing lab where the instructor would walk in and say, 'okay - write about turkeys for the next two hours'. I swear.

Having come from Catholic schools, I had a taste for that sort of discipline. It was like boot camp, but ultimately I enjoyed it.

Yeah, but you drove it home.

You can get away with a lot of bad, florid writing in academic circles.

You mean there's any other kind of writing in academic circles?

One of the giveaways that someone learned to write by writing term papers: wall-to-wall passive voice.

Kerry is right that you have to be a ruthless editor of your own stuff before you even show it to anyone. I have that tendency anyway, and my HS journalism department was first stop for some pretty prominent journalists, which the teacher referenced if we needed aspiration/inspiration. Our aim was to produce a better standard of writing than the local paper, and when that paper is the Minneapolis Star & Tribune that's bloody easy to do. After beginning in this style, you invariably have high standards.

I used to believe an ideal writing seminar setting would be The Algebra Class. An algebra teacher would be hired to drone on about algebra while a classful of furtive writers ignored him or her to concentrate on their manuscripts. I was an insolent teenager who answered 'what do you think you are doing?' questions with 'what does it look like? I'm writing a book!'

DVD3000, it was at Northwestern, as an undergrad, but their continuing ed. program offers journalistic writing I and II (and the prof. is pretty good, too).

It doesn't really have anything to do with opinion or withholding of same. And nothing moves narration/commentary along better than people/things/ideas doing something than just being something.