The Daily Plan-it / Dean of Students Blog, Columbia J-school

Chris Chivers, J’95, is a former Marine who now has one of the most prominent bylines at the NYT. He talks about the J-school in this Mediabistro piece: http://www.mediabistro.com/articles/cache/a4766.asp

Do you think an education at Columbia is important if you want to work at a newspaper? I understand
that you had a choice of two big newspaper jobs following your time at Columbia—the Providence
Journal in Rhode Island and a newspaper in Philadelphia. Why did you choose the Providence Journal?

Forget the debate about whether journalism schools are useful or useless. Columbia is useful. And
forget the ivy. The place is a trade school, and I mean that as a compliment. Let me say I am
speaking of the past—I understand Columbia has changed parts of its program, and I know little
about these changes, so am not qualified to talk about the present day. But when I went there I
wanted very much to learn a craft, and the Columbia j-school knew how to teach a craft. The Marines
had shown me—and I still believe this—that excellence is about fundamentals. Journalism is like
that, but by the time I decided to try journalism I was 29, and had little insight into the skills
I would need. What records are we entitled to? How do you get them? What lines of questioning can
elevate an interview, and yield the details and facts and impressions that can elevate a story? How
does the First Amendment work in practice? Even little things, like where can we sit in a
courtroom? When we’re starting out we don’t know these things. And by that time I had been a Marine
Corps company commander, and I didn’t like not knowing where the switches were. Columbia provided a
set of answers to these questions, and many others.

Whether the j-school experience is important if you want to work at a newspaper is another
question. It depends. If you’ve worked hard at a solid local newspaper, or are some kind of genius,
then you don’t need j-school. You probably already know at least half of what they teach, and you
may have been smart enough to have been paid to learn it. But if you don’t have journalism
experience, signing up for a structured curriculum is a good play. What did it get me, short-term?
When I left I had interest from the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Providence Journal. These weren’t
big jobs. They were internships with a small possibility of a full-time slot. I chose Providence
because it was clear from the interviewing process that the editors in Rhode Island were more
personally interested in their young reporters. And the fishing was better. That mattered.