ARTICLE: NYT on state of J-schools (including ours)
The New York Times
May 15, 2006
Times Are Tough for News Media, but Journalism Schools Are Still Booming
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
LINK: http://nytimes.com/2006/05/15/business/media/15students.html
But there is one corner of the profession still enjoying a boom: journalism schools.
Demand for seats in the nation’s journalism schools and programs remains robust, and those schools and programs are expanding. This month, they will churn out more graduates than ever into a job market that is perhaps more welcoming to entry-level multimedia-taskers than it is to veterans who began their careers hunting and pecking on Olivetti typewriters.
Columbia references:
- Michele Steele, 27, who is graduating from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York, has a similar outlook. She has been hired as a reporter and anchor for the video network at Forbes magazine’s Web site, www.forbes.com.
“Certainly the industry is changing,” Ms. Steele said as she monitored the Forbes Web site in the school’s new Roone Arledge Broadcast Lab, named after the former head of ABC News. “But the changes are positive.”
- At Columbia in New York, one multimedia student, Julia Kumari Drapkin, said she was having just that experience.
Ms. Drapkin, 27, a photographer who had taken pictures in Sri Lanka after the tsunami and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, went to Columbia to broaden her skills. She said that some news organizations were not yet ready to allow photographers to write, for example, or shoot video, but she did find a summer internship at Time magazine and its Web site, where she said she would be encouraged to help “rethink the photo essay.”
“In this changing media landscape, there’s an opportunity for us to be able to do a new kind of reporting,” she said. At Time, she said, “there will be conversations about how to handle the new media and I want to be part of that conversation.”
- At Columbia, Emily Brady, 29, was waiting to talk to a recruiter from Newsday, the Long Island newspaper beset with woes ever since a circulation scandal in 2004. “You don’t go into this profession to get rich,” Ms. Brady said. “There are financial sacrifices, it’s a tough profession, you’re under fire, and it’s not necessarily the most popular thing to say you’re a journalist,” she said. “But it’s a calling.”
