When I was in college, I walked by the journalism school every day on my way to my own classes, and that's the closest I've come to having any sort of journalism background.
I was in the journalism program in college and had some internships in print journalism during the summers. The plan was to go to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to learn broadcasting after I graduated. I was enrolled and everything, but ultimately decided that I could never afford to pay back the loan I'd have to take out.
The only school that let me in was U.C. Santa Cruz, which is where I went. They didn't have a journalism program, so I took sociology, which is the closest thing to journalism.
Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.
Every journalism bromide - speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the powerful - that otherwise would be hopelessly sappy to a journalist of any experience, has become a Twitter grail. The true business of journalism has become obscured because there is really no longer a journalism business.
Anyone who does investigative journalism is not in it for the money. Investigative journalism by nature is the most work intensive kind of journalism you can take on. That's why you see less and less investigative journalism at newspapers and magazines. No matter what you're paid for it, you put in so many man-hours it's one of the least lucrative aspects of journalism you can take on.
I finished high school and studied at the University of Nebraska in the school of journalism, which really turned me onto journalism. I never finished, but the very little that I did learn in two-and-a-half-years prepared me for a career in legitimate journalism, which included WWE, AWA, WCW, and everything in-between.
I got in journalism for any number of reasons, not least because it's so much fun. Journalism should be in the business of putting pressure on power, finding out the truth, of shining a light on injustice, of, when appropriate, being amusing and entertaining - it's a complicated and varied beast, journalism.
I loved journalism until the day my journalism teacher, a man I revered, came by my desk and said, 'Are you planning on going into journalism?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'I wouldn't.' I said, 'Well, why not?' He said, 'You can't make a living.'
I went to journalism school, so sometimes writing the script of 'Being Mary Jane' is me putting my journalism hat on.
I have this sort of heuristic view that journalism, we possibly offer hope because the world is clearly run by total nincompoops more than ever... Not that journalism is always wonderful - it's not - but at least we offer some way out, some integrity.
When I was in college, there were a couple years there where I was just not sure what to do, and it was actually my mom who suggested I take some journalism classes.
You do not need to go to journalism school if you want to work in the fashion industry. I think high schools condition you to think this way: If you want to be a fashion editor, go to fashion school. If you want to be a writer, you should study journalism. I think that the best school in life is experience.
Almost everything I've learned about journalism has been from other friends who are journalists, taking advantage of the money I hope they don't think they threw away at j-school. I studied comparative literature, but the professional vagaries of journalism I've learned through other people's trial and error, and my own.
American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to dramatic art, for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible.
The whole sort of debate of classic objective journalism versus a new immersion journalism - that can go on forever... I made no bones about my position: I don't think you can be objective.