Re: (The End of) Journalism Thread
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2021 12:35 pm
Guess who's having Shake Shack for lunch!?
It's the sixth version of The Swamp. What could possibly go wrong?
http://www.sportsfrog.net/phpbb/
I was going to tell you later this afternoon, but decided to stick with the phily cheesesteak place close to my office that I haven't been to in over 10 months.The Sybian wrote: ↑Tue Jan 05, 2021 1:09 pmI want to know more about the Shake Shack Korean Chicken Sandwich.
Damnit! I need to know!Giff wrote: ↑Tue Jan 05, 2021 1:20 pmI was going to tell you later this afternoon, but decided to stick with the phily cheesesteak place close to my office that I haven't been to in over 10 months.The Sybian wrote: ↑Tue Jan 05, 2021 1:09 pmI want to know more about the Shake Shack Korean Chicken Sandwich.
In one sense. Though another is at least she’s not getting her nonsense amplified with free media.sancarlos wrote: ↑Mon Jan 25, 2021 12:44 pm Close readers of the Swamp may recall that I’m at my parents’ home in New Mexico this week. They are dedicated readers of the Albuquerque daily newspaper and watchers of the local evening news. And they both tell me they’ve never heard of Lauren Boebert. To me, that’s a failure of journalism.
The hot honey chicken is pretty damn goodThe Sybian wrote: ↑Tue Jan 05, 2021 2:57 pmDamnit! I need to know!Giff wrote: ↑Tue Jan 05, 2021 1:20 pmI was going to tell you later this afternoon, but decided to stick with the phily cheesesteak place close to my office that I haven't been to in over 10 months.The Sybian wrote: ↑Tue Jan 05, 2021 1:09 pmI want to know more about the Shake Shack Korean Chicken Sandwich.
I saw that story and I sort of agree both with Dowd and with your assessment of her motivation.DaveInSeattle wrote: ↑Mon Aug 16, 2021 6:33 pm The NY Times this weekend had a Maureen Dowd column that went on and on about Obama's birthday party (I won't bother to link to it), and how awful it was that he had it, and called him "Barack Antoinette".
And all I could think was that she was just pissed that she didn't make the pared-down invite list. If she had been invited, she never would have written it.
Lol. It definitely would if I were Bronto.The Sybian wrote: ↑Fri Sep 10, 2021 10:32 am Does it qualify as irony asking for someone to give you a paywalled article about how journalism students can't repay their loans?
Funny, I just got an email this morning from the library showing me how to set up an account with WSJ at no cost. About to hop on a wifi-less flight, but I'll try and grab it when I get to a computer if no one else has already.Steve of phpBB wrote: ↑Fri Sep 10, 2021 10:22 am Anyone have a WSJ subscription and want to infringe some copyright? I'd like to read this article. (The woman is someone I "know" through Cubs Twitter.)
News reporting has lost thousands of jobs over the past decade, with a further slide predicted. Yet, journalism schools continue to churn out heavily indebted master’s degree graduates hoping to find a footing in the cratering industry.
Many students leave even the most prestigious private graduate programs, such as those at Northwestern University, Columbia University and the University of Southern California, with earnings too low to let them make progress paying off their loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department figures released this year.
At Northwestern, students who recently earned a master’s degree in journalism and took out federal loans borrowed a median $54,900—more than three times as much as their undergraduate counterparts did. That is the biggest gap of any university with available data. Worse still, the master’s degree holders make less money. Early-career earnings for those with master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern are about $1,500 lower than for its undergraduate students, data show.
About 65,900 people were employed as reporters, correspondents and news analysts in 2000, according to occupational data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Separate projections from the agency showed that jobs for those or similar positions fell to roughly 52,000 in 2019 and predicted a further 4.8% decline by 2030, faster than in most white-collar professions. Those figures don’t include additional newsroom roles such as photojournalists or editors.
Though online news jobs are forecast to grow, they won’t increase enough to offset steep losses in newspaper publishing.
While some national broadcast and print companies have expanded their audiences and posted solid earnings in recent years, most regional publications are barely keeping afloat via layoffs and budget cuts. More than 300 newspapers shut down between fall 2018 and summer 2020, according to a University of North Carolina study.
Median annual earnings for the remaining jobs, across all experience levels, are currently $49,300.
The number of master’s degrees being granted by journalism schools has dropped from a peak in 2014. But the schools—whose degrees aren’t required for entry into the field—are still producing nearly as many graduates as they did 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, prices for some of the most prestigious private graduate programs in the field have climbed.
Tuition for the one-year master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications increased by 17% in the past 10 years, adjusted for inflation, to $67,900 this school year, university records show. At the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, tuition for the 9½-month program rose by 26%, adjusted for inflation, to $70,300.
Including fees and living expenses, total costs for each program top $100,000.
While undergraduate loans are capped, graduate students can borrow up to the full cost of attendance through the federal Grad Plus program. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that pricey law schools, master’s programs in the arts and others have come to rely on the easy-to-access funds as a core element of students’ financing. Schools receive the money upfront, and taxpayers are on the hook for any loans that aren’t repaid.
Graduate students at private journalism schools borrow heavily to attend the programs. At USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, master’s graduates from 2015 and 2016, the latest cohorts for which both loan balances and earnings are available, had median debt of $67,700. The median loan burden was $56,700 at Columbia.
Anemic salaries make those debt loads difficult to manage. USC and Medill master’s graduates who took out loans had median earnings under $42,000 two years after finishing; Columbia’s earned a median of $49,900.
By comparison, at the well-regarded public University of Missouri, those with a master’s in journalism had median earnings of $50,500 and a median debt load of $21,000—among the lowest of any program with available data.
“We don’t have a lot of control over the state of the industry,” said John Haskins, who oversees admissions and career services as dean of student life at Columbia’s journalism school.
Columbia, which doesn’t have an undergraduate journalism degree, gave $7.6 million in scholarships to its roughly 360 graduate journalism students in the 2019-20 school year, the latest figure available.
Willow Bay, dean of USC’s Annenberg School, said the graduate programs there have earned an industrywide reputation for equipping students with the training they need to thrive.
Though Annenberg’s graduates from 2015 and 2016 had the largest gap between median debt and early-career earnings, the debt load dropped by nearly half in the next few years. The 2017 and 2018 classes had median loans of just under $36,000.
The school chipped away at students’ reliance on loans by trimming its program to 11 months from two academic years, beginning in 2015, Ms. Bay said. It also has raised nearly $7 million for scholarships since that time.
At Medill, generous aid packages are targeted more toward bachelor’s degree students, who leave school with a median debt load of $15,500.
Graduate students don’t get that same support.
Charles Whitaker, who has been Medill’s dean since 2019, declined to say how much the school awards each year in scholarships for master’s students, but called the pool limited and said fundraising for the aid is challenging. Northwestern is among the wealthiest universities in the U.S., with an $11.1 billion endowment; the school doesn’t break out how much of that is available for the journalism program to tap.
“Graduate student debt is the thing that keeps me up at night,” Mr. Whitaker said. He attributed some of the earnings differential to the fact that undergraduates often complete their degrees with multiple internships and years of experience on student publications.
At the graduate level, Mr. Whitaker said, “We take bright French majors and try to turn them into journalists in 12 months.”
The number of journalism master’s degrees awarded annually in the past few years by Medill has been between 120 and 140, down from about 185 a decade ago.
Mr. Whitaker said that employers are partly to blame for journalism graduates’ poor financial outcomes, and that he tells news-industry leaders, “I cannot in good conscience encourage students to go into this kind of debt if you cannot pay better.”
Michael Days, a former editor of the Philadelphia Daily News and past president of the News Leaders Association, said employers can’t do much more.
“Smaller papers just don’t have the ability to pay really high salaries,” he said, adding that it is a moment of existential crisis in the field. “The industry’s still trying to figure out what it is going to be in the digital world, how it is going to go beyond survival.”
Katie Dzwierzynski said she was flattered when Medill offered her a scholarship of a few thousand dollars a decade ago. She lived at home to save money, and borrowed nearly $70,000 to cover the rest of her costs.
She now earns about $65,000 writing newsletters and summarizing healthcare news for companies. Most months, Ms. Dzwierzynski, has made her loan payments, around $500, but sometimes she could only cobble together half that amount while the interest continued to grow. Her student-loan balance now stands at $79,000, including $62,000 from Medill.
Ms. Dzwierzynski, 32 years old, said she understood that she would be going into significant debt for the degree but didn’t know how little she would likely earn.
Medill says on its website that 88% of graduates from the class of 2020 were employed within six months of finishing school and landed jobs at outlets including BBC News, the nonprofit ProPublica and TV stations in Lansing, Mich., and Bangor, Maine. The figures include those in full- and part-time jobs as well as internships and freelance roles.
Adam Rhodes borrowed $75,000 to attend Medill’s journalism program, aiming to shift from a reporting job covering private equity for a legal publication to writing about social justice and LGBT issues.
Mr. Rhodes, who uses they as a pronoun, graduated in 2020 and got a fellowship at the Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly, making $38,000. They got a $2,000 raise when they went full-time earlier this month.
Mr. Rhodes took a 40% pay cut from their New York job, but said they are more fulfilled in their new role. Still, the loans loom large. The federal government paused payments during the pandemic, but when that lifts early next year, the 28-year-old intends to enroll in a repayment plan limiting monthly payments to a set share of their income. After 20 or 25 years, the remaining debt could be erased, and taxed as income.
Mr. Rhodes, who also has $33,000 in loans for their bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida, is holding out hope for President Biden to forgive at least some student debt.
“I am admittedly stressed about finances,” Mr. Rhodes said. “But if there’s any time to take on this kind of debt, it might be when it is potentially going to be erased.”
"Although evidence dates the spelling to the 1970s, we didn't enter lede in our dictionaries until 2008. For much of that time, it was mostly kept under wraps as in-house newsroom jargon."