Education reporting
March 9, 2009 2 Comments
Check out my profile of the non-Jewish principal of the new Hebrew Language Academy on the website for my Covering Education class.
Grad school in the recession? My experience
March 1, 2009 3 Comments
I have come across two interesting pieces that take entirely different perspectives about the question of whether to go to graduate school during the recession. The first is a blog entry by Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist, that says going to graduate school is not a smart way to dodge the recession because it saddles students with debt, immobility, and anxiety.
The second piece is a response from my favorite advice columnist, Cary Tennis, who advises a torn letter writer to go to graduate school and pursue his dreams instead of join the military and be useful. (One respondent humorously says, “Grad school has far more crazies than the military.”)
I am sympathetic to both Trunk’s and Tennis’s instincts, and I think maybe I can help, just a little, the torn graduate school applicant by offering some insight about my own experience in the M.S. program at Columbia School of Journalism. Please don’t take what I say as the gospel.
Sometimes I think that I may have jumped the gun and went to journalism school a little too soon, before I tried to pursue it on my own, but then I remember where I was last year: I knew I wanted to write for a career, but I didn’t know what or how, and I figured j-school would help me figure it out. At the time, I wasn’t even married to the idea of being a reporter.
I have gotten a much better sense of the type of reporting I like at Columbia. If I had forced myself to go to a daily in a part of the country or world that I wasn’t even that passionate about, I probably would not have found this. Instead, I would have been doing what I felt I was supposed to do to be successful in journalism, when I wasn’t even sure that is what I wanted.
That said, I have found that graduate school is not the best place to solve career and life uncertainty. I have had to really develop a strong sense of identity to fight against the stress and institutionalism that I can sometimes let get to me, and it is something that I may have done better had I given myself some time to just putz around or travel. Read more of this post
The winter of Elaine
February 20, 2009 1 Comment
Awhile ago, my friend Steph told me she was going to have a Summer of Steph, based on the famous episode of “Seinfeld”–though isn’t every episode of “Seinfeld” famous? Anyway, I have been having a inter of Elaine of sorts, and I will tell you why: I have, like Kevin McCallister in Home Alone, conquered my fears. I have gone into the proverbial basement and faced the proverbial talking stove. If Harry and Marv were trying to burgle my house, I would be prepared to array matchbox cars on the hardwood floors and aim the glue and feathers at the door.
A few of those mildly-conquered:
The winter. I have thought of winter in the past as a confining, dark, cold time that limits exercise, socializing, and general merriment. Well, one day I thought, why don’t I just run outside in the snow? What am I scared of? Wouldn’t it be better to feel like I could grab the snow by the neck and shake it a bit? As if to respond to this new boldness, the precipitate left the Tri-state area, the skies cleared, the temperatures went to the high 30s, 40s and sometimes even 50s and have stayed this way for weeks, it feels like. I would like to think my aggression was a part of this. And as much as I love my hometown Chicago-area, I do not feel like I’m missing out on the wretchedly cold and winter they have had this year.
The small apartment. I got an offer from university housing in December for amazingly-reasonable-by-New-York standards rent right across from the journalism building and the library. I hemmed and hawed for the first week of winter break over whether I should go through the frustrating process of moving and finding a subletter for my then-apartment in a renter’s market, which was a tiny room, even by New York standards, with not a lot of light. Then, encouraged by a few friends and family, I took the plunge, found a subletter, and moved to the new place. Again, taking the world–er my apartment–by the proverbial spherical objects.
The school. I have a dreadful fear of calling people. I couldn’t even make prank calls as a kid, because I would burst out laughing. So the whole “reporting” half of journalism can be wrenching. But i started to notice that it is for everybody. I realized I just have to call people and not worry about sounding like the brilliant journalist. After all, I’m calling my sources to learn stuff. So I shed my pride. It is amazing what kind of things happen when you do that. I also came into CU thinking I needed to take the classes that were practical, which meant business reporting. Then I decided second semester that I would be much better at classes that I can enjoy. As a result, I signed up for some great classes this semester. It’s a ball–well kind of.
Change versus more of the same. People who know me know that I get frustrated with the World. I finally began to realize–well, to actualize, if I may use a new agey Me Generation word–that I was expending too much energy on trying to change other people and the world. I don’t know what came over me, but somewhere I realized that it is more liberating to realize the only person I’m really responsible for is myself.
The media apocalypse series: a calm Tina Brown visits an anxious j-school
February 13, 2009 2 Comments
Columbia School of Journalism’s weekly Delacorte Lecture, which brings in magazine luminaries during the spring semester, is increasingly turning into the media apocalypse series. Last night, Tina Brown, the controversial former editor of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Talk Magazine came to discuss her new webzine, The Daily Beast and to take up the unrelenting narrative of the 2008-09 j-school year that the media as we know it is imploding.
Like many other speakers who have visited the school this year, she assured us that our class will live long and prosper in this new environment because of our youth and web savvy. Brown also made some fair points that the laments over the demise of the best aspects of old media are overblown. Sure, television networks have shuttered foreign bureaus, but when they were up and running, their main function was to send reporters to the crisis spot to do “stand-ups against palm trees.” She nevertheless assured her audience she is still committed to those old standards of putting out a publication with unique story angles and quality writing.
It must be the apocalypse if Tina Brown, who I had long held responsible for corrupting the New Yorker–not that I even read the magazine pre-Brown, as I was 9-years-old–starts making sense. It was not even so much about what she was saying but what she was doing–or more, that Brown was doing at all.
In these calamitous times, it is tempting to want to sit and predict the future and find a successful model to weather it. Brown certainly offered her prescriptions last night: be a business journalist and go to India where a new and incredibly lively English media market is emerging. I have heard these before many times and can think of counter-arguments to both: what will happen to the business press now that there are far fewer people in finance? And India’s media will probably experience contractions with this economy. Moreover, I met a grad student at a mixer afterwords who was a former journalist himself and said the writing in the Indian press was awful, contrary to Brown’s lavish praise of publications like Tehelka. In today’s climate, bureaus with abundant media jobs offer jobs that are drudge-work by a journalist’s standards. I can’t imagine that Indian media that are trying to lure young English-speaking Americans are any different. What often goes unsaid in the fretting about all of the outsourcing to India is that they are getting the worst of our jobs. (Read Katherine Boo’s The Best Job in Town from the July 5, 2004, New Yorker if you can get your hands on it).
But I digress. There is no successful model. We just gotta to do what we gotta do, to paraphrase a Nina Simone song, rather than figure out what the successful journalist of the future will look like. Will s/he be a Flash maven? A camera-toting, freelancing, globetrotting adventurer? Will s/he bring back the glory days of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer?
During the Q&A, a woman who many in the audience clearly thought was insane stood up to urge the students to “hook up” instead of spend time trying to figure out what the future will look like. Even though Tina humorously responded that the people in this school probably don’t need to worry about failing to hook up enough, I thought that woman had a point. We’re too caught up here in worrying about the great Unkown to a degree that is almost absurd. I mean, don’t we all make fun of psychics?
The great thing and the problem with academic institutions like the Columbia j-school is they engage in a lot of this soul-searching. To quote a line that Vice President Nixon once posed to President Eisenhower, “General, there comes a time in matters like this when you need to either shit or get off the pot!”.”
So unambitious
February 12, 2009 1 Comment
Sometimes, in the atmosphere of high achievement I constantly find myself in, I feel so unambitious. Career services just forwarded us an email to apply for a Nicholas Kristof travel tour. The winner gets an all-expenses paid trip to beautiful Africa, complete with tours of hot spots. (Okay, I don’t know if that’s true). For you aspiring Africa reporters out there, you ought to go for it. To me, it sounds like just about the last thing I would want to do. There is enough difficulty in the world as it is right now that it seems a lot to ask of oneself to hang out and try to impress a foremost guy in his field like Kristof in such a troubled region. Am I crazy for seeing these “go and be an idealist in a foreign country or poor area of the USA” opportunities as so hopelessly daunting? Perhaps. I’m also just sick of getting Career Services e-mails. I get it guys, I should get a job!
I often make predicitions in my head about what the future will look like, and I believe the privileged in my generation will someday have a backlash against the expectations put on them as young people. I’m already part of the backlash myself. I want to savor life, not race through it. I want to savor life like a Werther’s Original candy. 
O’Reilly challenges Columbia j-school’s reputation. We’re through.
February 11, 2009 Leave a comment
To think that the Columbia Journalism Review, a magazine that has been sitting in my mailbox in the basement of the journalism school gathering dust, could provoke such a thorough condemnation of the school from Bill O’Reilly is pretty ridiculous. Columbia “used to be the best j-school in the country, but it has become a hotbed of liberal activism these days,” O’Reilly said on his show last week as he began ripping into an article from CJR. Never mind that the students at the j-school do not write for CJR.
Even more ridiculous, O’Reilly has one of his minions follow the editor of CJR, Mike Hoyt, onto his bus in New Jersey to hound him about why he had someone from the magazine the Nation write for CJR, after Hoyt earlier told the Factor he did not have time to prepare to appear on the show that week. The outrage of the whole segment seems forced and phoned in. I think it is just O’Reilly’s attempt to promote his alma mater, Boston University.
By the way, even more ridiculous, O’Reilly follows that by giving a scolding to the paparazzi for hounding Miley Cyrus. Jon Stewart did a brilliant send-up of the whole thing last night.
Check out my covering education blog
February 11, 2009 Leave a comment
If you enjoy my blog here but are hungering for something a little weightier than Steve Harvey’s dating advice or the subway series, mosey on over to my covering education in New York City blog, which I just got up and running today. I’m taking the Covering Education seminar at the journalism school and covering New York City schools for the coming semester. With the Obama administration actually talking about funding schools, it is shaping up already to be a different education landscape than we saw under Bush. Yesterday, the author of a book that may well influence Obama’s education policy came to talk to our class, and I covered it here.
Sorry for the self-promotion. It is part of what we learn in new media mindset indoctrination class.
Perspective on Israel, from a friend
January 11, 2009 1 Comment
My friend, journalism school classmate, and New York Times-published journalist Sonja has a worthwhile and even funny entry on her blog about the reporting on the conflict between Israel and Hamas. I know too well what she means by self-satisfied anti-Israel “liberals” who do not acknowledge the severe limits of their knowledge about this conflict while at the same time know that my personal knowledge of the Palestinian difficulties, like almost everyone else, is nonexistent. I’ll excerpt this fact in particular, because I think it is very important to keep in mind:
There are, on average, 1,000 foreign correspondents reporting from Israel and the occupied territories–a nation with about the same geographic size and population as New Jersey–at any given time. In times of war, like right now, the number swells to upwards of 3,000.
Consider, then, that on the entire continent of Africa–the world’s second most populace continent after Asia– with its myriad wars, legions of corrupt governments, genocides, AIDS and MDRTB, pirates, inflation, starvation and hotbeds of militant fundamentalism, there are an average of 900.
Learning about the world is done…in the world
December 3, 2008 1 Comment
As a bookish person, I used to be skeptical toward a saying of older peers in college that “I learned more from the people than the classes.” However, I returned to the saying throughout college, usually after I got to know someone and understand how both knowable and unknowable s/he was. Still, “bubble” or “Ivory tower” I think are pretty apt descriptions of universities. Of course, each of us live in a bubble of some kind, but there is a certain distance one gets when one only lives in a relatively comfortable space around people pretty similar to him or her in general life goals (i.e. material and professional success) and socio-economic class.
I can say today that I have probably learned more about the world in the few years after college than in all of my years of formal education, and the more I learn, as a high school teacher of mine once said, the less I know. I do credit my education for teaching me how to work hard and to love learning, but I think in some ways, the tendency toward approaching problems like a Western “rational” thinker rather than a human being that is inculcated in college has been limiting to me.
There are many instances when I see theory limiting common sense thinking in the broader public. Take the barometer that commentators are using to measure Obama’s cabinet choices: from liberal to moderate. How rarely does a politician, even the most doctrinaire, hew to an ideology? Usually, I find that moderate often means someone in the establishment–a Joe Lieberman type–while liberal is someone farther out. If the media wrote mostly about politicians not in terms of their ideology but in terms of their actual, tangible interests–usually determined by their friends, their campaign contributions, their past line of work–I think we would get a better picture of our politicians. Certainly even politicians have worldviews, but I think these are more complex than left vs. right, as most people’s are, and even the least charitable right-winger can usually find some charity in him when something bad happens to his family member (think about all of the law and order politicians who have gotten their kin out of trouble). Read more of this post
People DO read on the subway
October 28, 2008 Leave a comment
A hard-bitten editor took me to task for not speaking up a couple of weeks ago at a session about freelancing to her paper and others in New York. “You students have to be more brave,” she said after imploring me to speak up.
She also complained that she sees no one reading on the train these days, which she said explains why her paper needs to write shorter articles. Well, last night I did an informal survey of my section of the One Train going uptown. On the side across from me, four out of seven riders were reading–one the New Yorker, one the New York Times, another a book, the fourth another magazine. On my side, three out of the six of us were reading. I was one who was not reading, because I only had a few stops on the train, and I needed to rest my eyes after a long day anyway.
I don’t know what subway this woman rides, because my experience last night is pretty typical of what I see on the train. I also do not think making conclusions about people’s reading habits based on subway rides is so smart. Plenty of people are just exhausted on the train, especially going to or from work, and need to close their eyes or stare straight ahead, even the voracious readers among us. Is that so wrong?
