Q: I was reading your response to a question regarding if newspapers looked at the work one did at their college newspaper favorably. It was a rather discouraging answer.
I am editor-in-chief at an independent, non-profit newspaper serving my university, which is not affiliated with the newspaper. Does this experience count any more than working for an administrative newspaper owned by the school?
I am about to become publisher starting next year and this would give me complete ownship of the newspaper. Since this paper is not affiliated in any way with the university, we have to do everything including getting advertising, recruitment, finding stories and competing with the university’s
own newspaper.
Is this type of experience, where I have learned every aspect of journalism I know from design, layout, writing, business, leadership and various other bits of information, any better looked upon by
newspapers and/or magazines?
Meredith
A: I’m sorry the answer is disappointing, but I’ll stand by it. Even though you may run a wonderful, profitable college newspaper without help from the university, these facts don’t change: It is not a mainstream, commercial paper. Your writers tend to be 19-22 years old, rather than the 25-65 we might find at other papers. Your staff will have a turnover rate of 100 percent every three years or so. Your paper has far more in common with a university-run student paper than with the local commercial papers. Few people at your paper have even as much as a year of full-time daily experience. Their main job is to be students. This doesn’t take anything away from your effort or the quality of the work you do. Your paper may well be better than many or most other college papers. But what you’re doing is not the same as what goes on at daily newspapers, and editors will still see your paper, independent or not, as a student-run enterprise.
Living in the real world means understanding how you’re evaluated and why, rather than chafing under it. So, if you are editor or publisher of a college paper, be the best one you can be. Your competition for jobs, after all, are all the publishers of all the other college newspapers, not the publisher of the local daily, who probably has 20 years on you in experience and, if the paper has decent circulation, $100,000 or more on you in wages.
(I wonder, as publisher, do you “own†the paper? I know very few publishers who own their newspapers. They usually are running them for other people or companies. Will you, for instance, sell your newspaper to another publisher when you’re done with it? Can you continue owning it as long as you like once you graduate? These may seem like semantic distinctions, but they are bigger than that and lead you to a better understanding of your job in the context of the journalism business. You don’t want to be seen a as publisher who doesn’t really know what the business is all about.)
So, understand the differences between college papers and commercial papers, realize how the jobs are different and what qualifications you have to commend you to papers, and then go get them.
While you may have a more real-world experience than someone else who publishes—or edits—a university-run paper, editors will figure that the nature of the job does not indicate that you have a lot more talent than those other people—you’re just going to universities that have different set-ups. The exception would be if you founded this newspaper.
So, understand the differences, don’t get hung up on whether you’re being accorded more, less or the same amount of respect as someone else and work on making your paper, your staff and yourself the best that you can.
