J-School 101: After graduation
For the final part of my two-part series all about journalism school, I chatted with two of my very good friends about their experiences both in and out of J-school. Check out the first part of the series here.
Both interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Emily Dobler
Meet Emily Dobler, the night policy editor for Politico. She did not go to J-school for her undergraduate degree, but majored in English and professional writing at Carnegie Mellon. Emily has been a journalist for about eight years and just survived her third election working the 9:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. shift. We discussed what to do if you, like her, didn’t go to J-school but still want to get into journalism.
Lian: Emily, how have you been, here, in the end times?
Emily: I already work from home a lot, so not much changed. And it means I get to spend a lot of time with my cat, Goblin, who really likes it.
Lian: Tell me a little bit about your college experience. How did you choose your major?
Emily: I knew that I was really into writing and politics, and I knew that I didn’t want to stay in New York, where I’m originally from. I visited Carnegie Mellon on a whim and fell in love with it and just decided, “All right, I’m going here. This is what I want.”
Fast-forward to my sophomore year when I was like, “Huh, I really, really miss writing.” That’s when I made that switch [from political science] to English and professional writing instead. It’s fun going to Carnegie Mellon as a not-computer science major (I say sarcastically). I went to literally the opposite of a J-school, I would argue.
Lian: Why and how did you get into journalism? What was your trajectory?
Emily: I joined the school newspaper, the Tartan, which was very formative. It’s literally my foundation for all of journalism. That was journalism getting its claws into me and after that, I was hooked.
Our school paper was a free weekly, and it did not have great readership. Not a lot of people wanted to be on staff. It didn’t pay you. You had to work every single Sunday — called production Sundays — for 12 hours to get it done and out the door. On top of all of your coursework, committing to the school newspaper was like an additional 40 hours of work.
It was really joining that paper, where the people who joined were people who loved the craft, that’s where I got that first taste and had that experience of learning from these people on the fly. We were just a bunch of scrappy underdogs in my mind. I learned every single thing about a newsroom in this microcosm.
Emily’s home office, with this dream of a bookshelf.
Lian: Do you feel like you missed out on anything by not going to J-school? Or do you feel like the school newspaper was a stand-in for it?
Emily: In my first job at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the joke around the office was that it was like a mill for state college graduates. In that first job, I felt like I was missing out on something, especially because the state college had a really strong student newspaper. That was also around the time that the Jerry Sandusky scandal broke, and around his trial I was like, “I do feel a little self conscious about this.”
But part of me always did feel that I didn’t miss out on that much because of the school newspaper experience. To me, J-school is like a really expensive way to network. The way that you get ahead in journalism is networking and experience; it’s not going to a $60k school, learning the five W’s, and how to write a straight news story. I don’t feel like I was ever actually at a disadvantage, except in that networking department.
Lian: What was the ratio of J-school graduates amongst your colleagues in your early career? What was that like?
Emily: At the Post Gazette, I definitely felt the J-school thing more, because so many of my colleagues were from the state college and they all knew each other.
At Politico, I didn’t feel that necessarily. Instead, it was more like, “Oh, I don’t have a graduate degree, and everyone here does.” In both those situations, that just motivated me to work harder to prove myself. I feel like that’s a theme of my entire career, having this feeling of needing to prove myself and being the irreplaceable person in the room.
Lian: When you started at the Post Gazette, what was your role? What did you do?
Emily: When I first started, I was just a copy editor. And then after a year, I wanted to learn and do page design. I learned InDesign from the Tartan’s managing editor and just by working with her, I was able to learn and piece it together from there.
[At the Post Gazette] I was getting bored of just doing copy editing, so I went to my boss one day was like, “Hey, I think I can do this, I’m interested in learning more about it. I know we’re short on page designers. You’re always looking for people to do this, and to maximize your staff. So let me take on extra work and it will reward you in the long run.” I guess I was good at it enough, so I was front page designer slash copy editor for the rest of the time that I was there.
Lian: What were some of the skills that you were able to teach yourself?
Emily: How to navigate a newsroom and knowing how to get people to do things during the back and forth of editing. Meeting people where they’re at, that was one of the biggest skills that I learned through doing the student newspaper, at my old job, and at this current job. I don't know if that’s even something that you could learn at J-school, I feel like that’s probably just from work experience and being out there.
Emily’s work from home buddy, Goblin.
Lian: What is your advice for people wanting to get into journalism who aren’t J-school students or graduates, or for anyone looking to switch careers?
Emily: I keep coming back to networking because the journalism world especially feels so small. If you have that connection, absolutely use it; that’s half of how I got my job at Politico. I met one of the copy editors at an American Copy Editors Society conference and then a year later, I applied and reached out to him. Find an association or a group that you can join; those groups are really good at connecting you with people.
I would also say, especially for people who are looking to transfer into it, something one of my mentors taught me was: Read everything you can. When you read a good article, pay attention to why that was a good article and compare the same topic covered by two different outlets.
Lian: If you don’t have the “official” or formal training, you have to do a little bit of studying yourself. When you’re still trying to find your own style, it’s really important to be looking at this broad range of information and seeing what really speaks to you as a person. At the end of the day, it’s not just about whether or not you can reach a deadline first. As cheesy as it sounds, it’s how you tell a story.
Emily: Yeah, exactly. Like you could have the best story in the world and if you don’t tell it correctly, people aren’t going to listen, they’re not going to care.
Lian: What does journalism mean to you?
Emily: The thing that really drew me to the field and keeps drawing me back whenever I think about leaving it, is this concept of it being the Fourth Estate and holding the powerful accountable. Journalism is an invaluable service.
The erosion of local journalism just breaks my heart. National journalism is also important, but I would argue local journalism is so much more important because that’s your actual community. That’s actually where you can see these tangible differences. It feels so much more powerful at that local level.
Lian: I think information is empowerment in itself. If you don’t know what’s happening, if you don’t have the correct information, you can feel very powerless and scared. Especially now, having knowledge of how to protect yourself, your loved ones, and those around you, is literally life or death. Journalism obviously plays a huge role in that, but even in not-so-dire circumstances, just knowing what you should care about gives you more power.
Victoria Mier
Meet Victoria Mier! We met when we were on staff at The Temple News together and quickly became close friends. She majored in journalism, but left the industry after a few years and is now the owner of Black Cat Clothiers, a small business that sells beautiful antique and vintage garments. She shared how she went from newsrooms to estate sales, how the industry has changed, and what it’s like being a former journalist.
Lian: Why did you choose J-school?
Victoria: Writing was always the thing that I was good at. I was also like, “Well, I can’t go to school for poetry.” I was afraid that I wasn’t going to be able to survive, especially knowing that as a chronically ill person, medical bills and insurance are important.
I applied for the teen panel at a local newspaper and I got it, and that’s when I was like, “Oh, journalism is more than just how many people were shot yesterday.” I just fell into it and I decided that I did want to be a journalist.
Lian: When you were in journalism, what was your trajectory?
Victoria: I had done a lot of music journalism when I was 16, because back then, if you had a Tumblr blog that got enough traction, small bands let you interview them. I would come home from school, and my friend would drive me, and I would interview bands and photograph shows in small venues in Philadelphia.
By the time I went to Temple, I was still doing that, but I was interested in expanding. I started writing about theater for The Temple News, [then] I came back as the arts and entertainment editor. With my writers, I was like, “Okay, but why does this matter that this person is trying to make a blanket out of their tears? There needs to be more to it than just, ‘This artist is doing this crazy thing.’”
Baby Lian and Victoria in 2016.
When I graduated, I took a job as a metro reporter. I was very much okay with the idea of paying my dues and I hadn’t really done a lot of hard news reporting, so I figured it was a good thing. It was a really good, supportive newsroom. Obviously, they had gaps, but overall, they impressed me. The problem is that when you’re chronically ill, you can’t really work six or seven days a week from 3 p.m. to midnight, and then drive an hour and a half both ways.
I ended up taking a job as a magazine editor in South Jersey. They pulled that thing that now, as a small business owner, I am so conscious of and never want to do. They were like, “Oh, we’re a small business, so everybody has to wear multiple hats and pull a lot of their weight.” No, you need to hire enough employees and pay them well enough and have a structure. They need a job description that isn’t everything that you don’t feel like doing.
I was looking at the trajectory of my career and where I could go from here. I almost got a job at the Associated Press Philadelphia bureau, but it was on shift. So you’d work midnight to 6 a.m. for three months, and then you’d work 3 p.m. to midnight for the next three months, and then 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. It was such the logical next step, but I was like, I just don’t want to do this. I ended up leaving the industry with nowhere to really go, which was terrifying.
Lian: After graduation, you created an online arts publication, The Avenue, and ran that for a while. What was your process with that?
Victoria: Right around then was when a good amount of dailies and more feature-focused journalism outlets in Philadelphia were closing, or they were drastically changing what they were focusing on. I wanted to start The Avenue because I knew how vibrant and connected and engaged the art community is in Philadelphia. So I was like, “All right, this is what I love to do, why don’t I just take a stab at it?” And I’m really glad that I did. But while I was doing what I thought that I wanted to do and I had full control, I still wasn’t happy.
Midnight, a cozy little croissant.
Lian: Why did you choose to leave journalism?
Victoria: Over time, this industry turned out to be not what I thought it was. I kind of hated the whole “voice for the voiceless” thing, because no one’s voiceless; they’ve just been pushed out forever. The ways that I would have to reinvent myself to continue in journalism were just doing things that I didn’t want to do. I just wanted to do the 4,000-word magazine piece, but I didn’t want to do it for the people who would possibly let me do it for them.
There came a point, particularly with The Avenue, that I was writing about what these people were doing, like making a difference in their community, or just having a really cool business, and I wanted to do those things and not write about them.
Lian: Journalism is changing so much and I feel like the old-school, print-only traditional newsroom is fading, but the new definitions of journalism haven’t really settled in yet.
Victoria: Five percent of the reason that I decided to move on from journalism was because I was like, “The way I really want to do this is just not really a thing anymore.” I don’t need to have a place in the group of wonderful humans that are making journalism more viable and making it alive again, because I’m not pushing it forward. Yes, I can learn how to do these new things, but in my heart of hearts, at the end of the day, it’s not what I want to be doing.
My dream would be for that old-school way of doing things to be done by people who have traditionally been shut out of journalism. That’s not the way it has to happen and I think the complete and utter reinvention of journalism is so necessary and so needed, but I can’t help with that.
Victoria’s inspirationally witchy work from home setup.
Lian: Why and how did you start your small business, Black Cat?
Victoria: I got into selling vintage and antique clothing because I had spent so much of my life wearing it. Thrift stores were plentiful where I grew up, and even if I side-eye my fashion choices now, digging something out of a random bin was the best way to feel like an individual in a homogenous, boring suburb.
When I left journalism, I was planning on taking a few weeks off and then looking for different jobs in journalism-adjacent environments. Instead, my partner convinced me to give selling vintage a go. I knew basically nothing and it was really thanks to my research skills as a journalist that I know anything now.
To be clear, selling vintage is stupid hard. There’s so many people who do it and a lot of those people are incredible at it. I found my niche and I found my clients and I built a brand.
I got into it — and continue doing it — because I love fashion. I love the way that what we wear can send messages to the world and vintage and antique clothing really adds to that flavor. There’s a history to every piece, even if you don’t know about it, and it’s significantly better made than a lot of garments today, plus, it’s much kinder on the earth.
Once you handle an 1880s Victorian silk bodice dripping in beading and soutache and silk cord, made expressly for a woman mourning her second husband, there's really no going back if you're anything at all like me.
A 1970’s maxi dress from Black Cat that I immediately fell in love with and absolutely had to have.
Lian: Are there any skills that you’ve built up over those years of writing and reporting that carry over into what you do now, as a small business owner?
Victoria: Absolutely. Because I do my own social media and all the newsletters on my own, even though it’s a very different style of writing, having that is completely irreplaceable. If I went to school for business, I don’t necessarily feel like those would be skills that I have. Also, the degree to which you’re forced to just talk to random people all the time in journalism, as well as how to deal with them.
Definitely developing a thick skin for people on the internet, because you have to do that on day one with journalism. When you’re a small business owner, people don’t think that you’re a person, in a lot of ways.
There’s this degree of organization, research, and thought process that I think is shared throughout good journalists. That is very, very important to a small business. When I started selling antique and vintage clothing, I had the ability to research and network and connect with people to find out where the good stuff is. Some of that’s just an hour of googling, and some of that is making the lady at the estate sale like you so she tells you stuff. All of that comes straight from journalism.
Lian: What do you think about the concept of J-school?
Victoria: There’s a degree to which journalism is a trade. I don’t know if you need a four-year degree to do it, but unless things change dramatically, someone needs to teach you a lot of the software and equipment. Journalism is all hard skills, and then if you’re good at it, you learn the soft skills while you’re doing it.
Particularly with blogs and citizen journalism, there’s also a degree to which people need to learn ethics. Being around other journalists who know more than you is the best thing in the world because they have seen so much shit and if you have a problem, they can give you guidance.
I don’t feel like I wasted my degree because I don’t feel like I’d be that far along with my small business without it. Journalism has hard skills that are applicable to so many things. I very much consider myself a former journalist, I think it will always be part of my identity.
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Bonus playlist
Need some soothing sounds for your ears and heart after the election? Here’s my quintessential autumnal playlist, just for you.
