To Degree, or Not To Degree?

A friend of mine recently lost his job with a large Canadian news conglomerate. He’d been with them for several years as an entertainment writer, but given the state of the economy and how the web has taken over the Dead Tree Press, he was laid off in a round of cuts. Actually, it wasn’t a “round of cuts” so much as a machete massacre.

So now, with all these years of experience behind him, he finds himself freelancing and wondering just what kind of bachelor’s degree news outlets are looking for. Womyn’s Studies? Philosophy? Or actual Journalism?

With quality of writing either difficult to judge – it’s been so long, after all, that people have forgotten what it looks like – or immaterial, the only way to evaluate a new hire is by their qualifications, which means the resumé (that they’ve probably padded) or their degrees (which are easier to verify.) J-school has gone from being a probable liability that a decent editor will do their level best to train out of a promising hire, to the only certainty you have that the poor schmuck you’re plugging into a copy editing desk or the night local chair that was recently vacated by a 25 year veteran will at least know how to get multiple sources, do a line edit or work the layout software.

I’m not saying that good writing or a solid resumé won’t get you a job – the industry’s not in that terminal a state, regardless of what Jeff Jarvis might want you to believe, though it may be, thanks to a herculean effort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Turnover and churn-through in newsrooms has been gruesome over the last decade, though, and the industry’s finally caught up with its own dire predictions about itself, and the urge to either speed along the radical reinvention or go turtle and hope that there’s still some beach left when you poke your head out again means that mere verifiable competency is more valuable than idiosyncratic talent, or a veteran’s jaundiced and possibly disappointed perspective.