After much delay, here’s the final (for now) installment of Journalism 101: What They Won’t Tell You in J-School (Until It’s Too Late).
Actually, the title of this is misleading: I actually heard all of this before graduating college, but not by much. The horrified faces of those around me said that other broadcasting and journalism students hadn’t heard it until it was essentially too late either. So, in the hopes of giving people a head’s up, let’s go over the bad news. I still think journalism is a great profession — I left a kickass job in the videogame world to come back to it, after all — but aspiring journalists should go in with their eyes open.
1) No one’s kidding about paying dues. My first story was a planning commission meeting in Christiansburg, Virginia. It’s so dull that, even today, I can barely stand to re-read it. Your first stories will be the same. It will be months, perhaps years, before you have a shot at writing the sorts of stories you want. You may be the world’s greatest undiscovered cops/courts reporter, but the paper you start off with will be in Mayberry, or you’ll be inputting community events items for the Neighbors page while you wait for the cops/courts reporter to move on to another paper. (See below for more on that.) And there will be no sympathy from the people around you: We’ve all done police logs, had our butts fall asleep in brutally slow meetings and interviewed people about things that we can’t believe even the people themselves care about
2) There is no money, sorry. When I say “no money,” I mean for nearly everyone. Remember the “look to your left, look to your right, one of those people won’t be here in a month/will fail out of the class/won’t get into law school” or whatever variant you heard in school? Change that to “only one person in this classroom will make their age in thousands of dollars after age 25.”
This is because of two factors: First, pay is theoretically pegged to how much money advertising pulls in over your circulation area. Since most media outlets are in relatively stable areas, that salary is pretty much locked into a short range. You might get a few raises, but after a year or three, you’ll likely have maxed that out, unless you’re at a very, very big paper, and you’ll just get cost of living increases after that.
Secondly, the job pyramid is very, very wide. There are many more people at the entry level than there are higher up. This means that not only can the media afford to not pay you quite as much as they could if they were scrambling for candidates to replace you, it also means that competition to go up the ladder is brutal, because the pyramid never narrows: The next rung up the ladder is always flooded with applicants whenever they have a new opening. Get used to your relatively low salary, because it’s not changing terribly quickly.
3) The hours suck. And they don’t stop sucking when you get to the position you’re interested in. This is especially true for sports reporters, for whom the brass ring means missing out on all the time normal people have free, since that’s when games are played. But for all reporters, count on missing birthdays, dates, parties and more. Do I want to be working until 11 p.m. on a Monday night at least once a month? No, but I need to be there.
4) You will be disliked by much of the public in a way only ambulance chasing attorneys can really understand. I’ve been hung up on while working at the Potomac News simply for being a journalist and much more often, I’ve had to overcome enormous prejudice against me to win the trust of a source.
There’s a large and profitable infotainment industry that, on both sides of the political fence, uses the media as a go-to demon, ignoring the fact that the infotainers are, themselves, in the media. Otherwise intelligent people will buy into the hype and believe that you’re out to get them, because they heard about it on the radio, on cable TV or on the Internet. In the last election cycle, I had not one, but representatives of two city council candidates want me off the story or the paper entirely, because I was “clearly” biased against them. That it would be all but impossible to be against both candidates (who were running against one another) at the same time didn’t affect their perceptions that I was out to “get” their guy, which they appeared to genuinely believe. (For the record, if I was out to “get” someone, it wouldn’t be an arguable thing. It would be obvious, and they’d be got and stay gotten.)
Hell, I once had a stripper make fun of my career choice.
Don’t get into this job expecting to be the hero of the little guy. Even if you are that hero, you’ll never hear about it, and it’ll be forgotten the first time you write something that people don’t want to hear about.
5) It’s death on relationships. As someone married (and just on my first), I’m a freak in the journalism industry. I had a professor at Tech say, quite frankly, they went into academia to save their marriage. Every newsroom I’ve ever been in was full of the never-marrieds and the divorced. If you troll through Yahoo! Personals you can spot some of the High Desert’s journalists, looking for someone who won’t hold being a journalist against them.
So, with all that stacked against it, why be a journalist? If you’re asking yourself that, maybe you shouldn’t be one. Your skill set can be profitably turned towards a number of other jobs, all of which eliminate most or all of the problems that journalists face. But you won’t be making the world a better place, even in a small way, on a regular basis. Because informing the public about what’s going on around them, whether it’s catching their elected leaders doing things they shouldn’t be, or recognizing the unsung heroes in their community or simply letting them get to know their neighbors in a way so few people now do, that’s what journalism is all about.
Life in Hesperia is different because of the Hesperia Star, and I happen to think it’s better. That’s a heck of a good way to spend your life. (And that doesn’t even include meeting people I’d never get to meet otherwise and to see places and things I’d never have seen otherwise, like riding a blimp over RFK Stadium or talking to Bosnians in the middle of their bullet-riddled home.)
School is starting back up now, and intern season is, for the most part, over. And more importantly, I’m out of topics for right now. We’ll pick this up again by next summer.
The Washington Times is many things, but known for great arts coverage it is not.
That said, this line from a review of Liz Phair’s concert at the Birchmere may be one of the best descriptions of her and her work that I’ve ever come across:
In such a stripped-and-clipped setting, the singer’s decade-strong catalog came across tough and tender, kind of like Miss Phair herself — a pint-sized charmer with a hazardously sexy persona and a potty mouth.
That’s deeply cool, in a nerdish writer way. You’ve got a rhyme, alliteration and a hardcore-fans-only allusion to a popular early bootleg of Phair’s work. (Look, this is better than the time at the News Messenger where we sat around goobing about the semicolon for over an hour.)
And yes, I’m still a Washingtonian in my brain, so I get to say “the Birchmere” as though everyone would know what and where that is.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say a certain nameless California governmental agency had consciously created a data dump so convoluted and so user unfriendly so as to force the media to rely on their canned spin on the report, whatever their apparent attempts to be media-friendly might otherwise suggest.
In any case, Journalism 101 and the other stuff I hoped to post Friday evening will have to wait for a bit while my eyes stop burning from eyestrain. If you’re good, I’ll post a picture of “the scar,” so people won’t have to keep asking me how I’m healing up from my operation. (I wish I could remember what the operation was called. “Medial thera-something-oscopy” is all I can remember. Those painkillers were impressive.)
And we’ll see whether the story about the nameless state report makes it into the next edition of the Star or the one after that.
Study: MMORPGs don’t make you more violent
Results of some of the first long-term research into online video game playing, conducted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign alongside Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, has reached results claiming that there is no evidence of a strong link between video game violence and aggression behavior in players.
Studies were made of players of Turbine’s massively multilplayer online role-playing game Asheron’s Call 2, where, after an average of 56 hours play a month there was found to be “no strong effects associated with aggressionâ€? caused by the game. Players were found not to be statistically different from the non-playing control group in their beliefs on aggression after playing the game than they were before playing – according to Dmitri Williams, the lead author of the study.
Of course, if they studied the effects of MMORPGs on housework, they might have had a very different result.
Sony rolls back EQ2 server after economy-altering hack used
How is it the yoyos thought they’d get away with this?
One Everquest II server suffered 20 percent inflation in the space of 24 hours after hackers exploited a bug in Sony’s code, before being rapidly rolled back.
Sony claims that a group of hackers illegally created a huge amount of Everquest II (EQ2) currency over the weekend, and says the players caused the game’s economy to suffer 20 percent inflation in just 24 hours before being caught.
According to Chris Kramer, director of public relations for EQ2 publisher Sony Online Entertainment, the players had on Saturday begun using their so-called “duping bug” to make large quantities of platinum, the game’s currency. (A duping bug is a hack that exploits a weakness in online games’ code to dublicate existing items to effectively create counterfeit currency or other goods.)
The players then began trying to sell the ill-gotten platinum on Station Exchange, the official auction exchange for EQ2 weapons, armour, currency and other virtual goods. “The amount of money in the game increased by a fifth in about 24 hours,” Kramer said. “We have a lot of alarms for this kind of thing, and they all went off on Saturday.”
The economy of the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) was quickly brought back to its pre-attack state, Kramer added.
SOE launched Station Exchange last month. The auction system allows EQ2 players who wish to buy or sell the game’s virtual goods for US dollars to do so in a system overseen by the company.
I’m sure it’ll be spun that having an Exchange-enabled server was a good thing in this case, instead of, say, providing a legitimate and popular way for people to buy large quantities of platinum to begin with.
EA censors Sims Online journalist
You just can’t make some of this stuff up.
The Sims Online is a for-profit subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) operated by Electronic Arts (“EA”).[4] Peter Ludlow is a University of Michigan philosophy professor[5] and author of the Alphaville Herald virtual newspaper,[6] which chronicles in-game developments.
The incident started when Ludlow alleged that The Sims Online participants, including some teenagers, engaged in “cyber-prostitution” in the game.[7] The term “cyber-prostitution” implied that avatars were engaging in simulated sex, but the game’s architecture limited the participants’ ability to do so.[8] Instead, participants (including some teenagers) allegedly traded cybersex chat for in-game currency,[9] although Ludlow picked a fairly inflammatory term to make the point.
Ludlow’s claim received some media attention, and Ludlow claims EA targeted him because this publicity was damaging to EA.[10] EA responded that Ludlow violated EA’s rules by linking from his in-game profile to his newspaper site. It’s a little unclear exactly why this link violated EA’s rules. Some reports say that the link broke the rules because the Herald site linked to information about how to cheat the game;[11] other reports say that a rule violation occurred because the Herald site was a commercial web site.[12] Based on its user agreement, EA probably could have terminated Ludlow’s account without any justification at all,[13] but EA appears not to have taken that route.
Whatever its reason, EA terminated Ludlow’s account in The Sims Online—giving him the online equivalent of the death penalty. Ludlow claims that this termination was unjustified and discriminatory because EA selectively enforced its rule against him and not others.[14]
Since the termination, Ludlow has railed against EA for its censorship. That is not unusual; many disgruntled customers have found a soapbox in cyberspace. What is unusual, however, is that Peter Ludlow’s story became a cause célèbre. His termination was covered by the New York Times,[15] the Boston Globe,[16] CNN,[17] the BBC,[18] and Salon,[19] and high-profile commentators such as Professor Balkin have supported his cause.[20]
I think the author must be relatively unfamiliar with online gaming to not consider trading simoleons for cyber to be prostitution, just because the little pixels don’t show getting it on. Amusing that EA’s response was to try to eliminate mentions of the practice, rather than to do something about the practice itself.
