How I Found Value in a Journalism Class

It isn’t uncommon for journalists to say that a formal journalism education is worthless: it’s expensive and only teaches aspiring journalists what can best be learned from the act of practicing journalism itself. Until recently, I had never taken a single journalism class in my life. I have worked, with some pauses along the way, as a freelance journalist for the last few years. I have written feature articles and front-of-book pieces for print. 

Regardless, when people who had graduated from journalism programs would say they didn’t gain much from their journalism education, it seemed particularly harsh to me. I wanted to be able to take journalism classes myself, but I hadn’t had the opportunity to do so. I attended a small state university directly after high school; the university didn’t offer journalism classes in the course catalog. By the time I had figured out that I had any interest in taking any journalism courses, I felt that I had effectively locked myself out of the opportunity. Receiving a good journalism education seemed like a massively expensive undertaking that I could not afford. 

I now attend Columbia University as a non-traditional student, finishing my education at a snail’s pace. When registration for Columbia’s summer session came around towards the end of my spring semester, I learned that it was more or less a free-for-fall: we could take any classes we wanted to (albeit we did have to meet the classes prerequisites). It resulted in a hodgepodge of class options. When I saw that War Reporting was one of the classes being offered, I immediately signed up with excitement. The class was being taught by The New York Times Magazine staff writer C.J. Chivers—one of a handful of journalists whose work had inspired me to become a journalist in the first place. Chivers’ feature articles, almost exclusively covering war and terrorism, made me realize that investigative reporting could be married with literary techniques. Taking a class under him seemed both thrilling and extremely nerve-wracking. I feared that I would somehow be disappointed and underwhelmed by the experience of studying under a journalist whose work I have long admired. 

We met twice a week, where we were assigned a sprawling list of reading material: feature articles, government documents, op-eds, books, and more. I learned quite quickly that, in the classroom alone, there was a lot of value in studying journalism in a formal environment. War reporting, by its very nature, presents a unique set of risks. The lectures on safety, case studies of journalists who had been injured or killed while in the field, and resources about further classes to take on conducting crisis management while reporting in a war zone, provided essential information that I would not have easily learned outside the classroom. 

By the second lecture, I had learned about Chivers’s techniques for structuring a feature article—he explained that feature articles could be thought of as being constructed in a fashion similar to the way we think of poems as structured. Sentences could be thought of as verses and paragraphs like stanzas.

Rather than seeing craft as separate from reporting, Chivers encouraged us to see craft as intertwined to every other aspect of journalism. He emphasized that we should see the multiple sources in our reporting as forming a mosaic—disparate elements that are connected to a coherent idea. But what really left a lasting impression on me was our discussions on the philosophy of journalism.

Throughout our careers as journalists, we wonder about how our stories should be framed, whether a voice is absolutely essential to a story or whether it should be dropped, and we contemplate what stories—if any—can be discarded. Even when our stories are finished, freshly published for the whole world to see, they aren’t truly finished. We anticipate that our stories will create, or at least influence an already existing, discourse.

These were topics and questions that I had always contemplated myself over my years writing about politics, crime, and whatever other beat had captured my brief obsessive interest, but had never really discussed with other journalists. The philosophical questions of journalism are not ones that we discuss at work or after-hours with colleagues. When we learn journalism through internships, freelancing, or staff jobs, we have a space to practice journalism. The classroom is separate from this, however, and it serves as a space where one can think about journalism and where journalism can be deconstructed and interrogated. 

Chivers raised important questions of his own: what messages are we amplifying with our stories? Are we confident in our vignettes in feature stories? Can we tell the difference between fairness and symmetry (where we give equal weight to every opinion, regardless of its value)?

Freelancing can be a lonely line of work. Although I often felt like I needed a mentor when I first started working as a journalist, I never sought one out—it felt awkward and intimidating to ask an established and respected journalist for advice or guidance. Having an established and well-respected journalist as my instructor, however, broke down the barriers of approaching them in the first place. During office hours sessions and in the classroom, Chivers was more than willing to answer my questions and go out of his way to help me.

I was stuck in a lull before starting the War Reporting course. I was finally freed of the intense workload of a semester in the regular academic year and had the time to pitch anything I wanted. Yet I felt uninspired as a journalist and unable to come up with any pitches, I felt like my creative well had run dry. Taking the course sparked my creativity and challenged me as a journalist. I have written only a few articles featuring my byline since coming to Columbia; I have a job as a content writer for the school, which sucks up much of the little free time that I have outside of school. The long gap between my last published piece made me feel far less confident about my skills as a journalist when I first walked into class. Receiving a lot of praise from a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalism instructor, however, has given me a hell of a lot of encouragement. 

Chivers noted how  the longform pieces we read, such as John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” that took up an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1946, would be the ones that stick with us years later. That made me remember exactly why I fell in love with longform magazine journalism in the first place: it’s topical but not completely temporal, it plants its feet firmly in place. Rather than focusing on the difficult media landscape or worrying about our journalism careers, the classroom gave my fellow students and I a place to analyze and appreciate Hersey’s article as not just a masterpiece of reporting but as a piece of art.

Chivers likened journalism to his church, an imperfect institution that disappoints us but also inspires us and gives us hope for the future. Its imperfections are great—there is journalistic fraud that tarnishes the industry and leads to a distrusting public, a focus on clicks rather than quality content, and an unhealthy obsession with chasing down an objectivity that does not exist.

J-Schools can certainly help perpetuate these problems, but it can also lessen them with a proper curriculum that emphasizes creativity, the artistic side of journalism, and the fact that journalism will always be somewhat subjective.

J-Schools, and any sort of formal journalism education, might be receiving scorn that is best reserved for the people responsible for making the industry so unstable in the first place.