An Open Letter to Journalism School Grads

Editor's note: The letter from an intern to National Geographic referred to in the following article ultimately proved to be a hoax. That info can be found Here.

First, congratulations. As of this month, after spending a year or two in classrooms and city council meetings and $30,000 or more for tuition, you are all newly minted journalism school graduates! That isn't the same as being journalists, but the distinction doesn't matter to many of you, anyway. In fact, a healthy percentage of your classmates--some 190,000 strong this year--will head directly for jobs in PR, marketing, or entirely unrelated professions which may pay enough to earn back your tuitions. The one trait you all share--assuming you were paying attention--is the ability to effortlessly write a nut graf. Again, congratulations.

This address isn't for future publicists, and it isn't for the mid-career journalists who took a timeout for nine months, either. They're already halfway down the route. What I really want is to ask the kids (because I was a kid when I graduated j-school and still am, honestly) if they understand exactly what it is they and their parents have just paid for.

You thought you were buying a set of skills, credentials, and quality time with the placement office. And you did. But your professors also sold you a mindset, a worldview, an ideology--one in which newspapers are God's work, bloggers are pagans, and your career trajectory is a long, steep, but ultimately meritocratic climb to a heavenly desk at The New York Times or 60 Minutes. Accepting any of this as gospel truth will almost certainly cause permanent damage to your budding careers.

To have made it this far, you've had to inhale the usual bromides like "the reporter's job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable"--a noble sentiment that overlooks the fact that anyone who can spend $30,000 on j-school should be considered "comfortable." You've been trained to be skeptical of every truth and every detail ("If your mother says she loves you, check it out") but you've been steered away from skepticism about j-school itself. So think of the following as a quick adult education course.

There is one book on the syllabus, On Television. It's a collected pair of lectures by the last of the French philosopher-rock stars, Pierre Bourdieu, whose life's work was discovering the hidden exchange rates between money, education, and culture.

On Television was a takedown of the TV news business, and of media careerism in general. His argument was simple, powerful, and pissed off a lot of French journalists back in the mid-'90s: media careers, he argued, aren't governed by the search for truth, justice, and transparency, but by institutional and peer pressure. "In other words, if I want to find out what one or another journalist is going to say or write, or will find obvious or unthinkable, normal, or worthless, I have to know the position that journalist occupies" in the media landscape.

Bordieu points out that just as every media outlet competes for readers, viewers, and advertisers, every journalist competes on a personal level for professional respect, greater responsibilities, a better title, a better salary, etc. This should be eye-rollingly obvious--it's office politics, people--but was never discussed in my two years of j-school, unless I count my professors' curt dismissals. Why?

Because journalism as we know it and j-schools are themselves caught up in a larger struggle for relevance. Newspapers are facing a permanent decline in readers and prominence. Not one of the broadcast news anchors you grew up with will be behind the desk tonight. You are the only hope for the future they've got; they're desperate to make believers out of you.

Bourdieu also explains (albeit in a different book) that an up-and-comer in a cultural field like media or academia has to make a choice: Do you side with the establishment in hopes that you will someday inherit it; or do you subvert the status quo by creating something new in hopes of winning a place at the table down the road?