by Marcus Willock

Created on: May 27, 2008   Last Updated: April 27, 2009

Survival Tips for Future Journalists

Journalism should not be thought of as an occupation, but a life style. As a journalist, you may travel the world setting up interviews with celebrities of every known profession. You will constantly learn new things about the world through first hand experiences. However, this glamorous view of journalism is only one aspect of the job. The actual work involved in journalism is grueling. You will spend all hours of the day and night working on articles that will be picked apart by your editors and, after a few revisions, mauled over by proofreaders who will question the clarity of your sentences that you spent hours composing. When you're a journalist, being criticized and working overtime becomes a constant in your life.

To survive in this business, you have to have patience. Finding a story is easy, but putting it into words can be difficult. There have been many journalist who have reduced a ground breaking story into an average article because they lacked the finesse to express the story in words. To avoid this, you must know how to write. As a journalist, you do not have to be an exceptional writer, but, as any author knows, great writing is the result of multiple revisions. You will have sit down meetings with editors who will criticize your work. You will also meet with proofreaders will nit pick at your word choice, but you must realize that all of this is done to improve your article. Though this process of creating a final draft is frustrating, you must take comfort in knowing that the best possible version of your work is going to be what gets published.

You must also know that every journalist is looking for that big story that will make him or her famous, but only a few find it. Like any other job, you will have to work you way up the ranks of hierarchy. This means that your editors will give you an assignment and, whether you like the assignment or not, you will do it to the best of your ability because a newspaper and/or magazine is made up of a team of articles, and, like a team, everyone journalist has to do their part in order for the organization to succeed. Also, you should put your all into every article you write because you can never be sure which one will establish you as a journalist. Finding that big story is always great, but finding a niche in which you can consistently create excellent work should be the ultimate goal of every journalist.

Knowing all this, you may wonder why someone would choose such a profession as journalism. It is not for the money because journalists are grossly underpaid. We do it for that moment of ecstasy we feel when we see the fruits of our labor. For some journalist, it is that sense of accomplishment that is felt after having completed another article before its deadline. Other journalists might derive enjoyment out of crafting a boring topic into an interesting article. As a whole, I know that every journalist takes pride in knowing that we bring the news to the people. So the next time you are reading an article, whether it is in a newspaper or a magazine, know that the person who brought you that information was a journalist.

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