So you want to be a journalist

I often get asked, either in person or at events, what I would say to an aspiring journalist. Here’s my advice.

First: try to get a bit of work experience in a newsroom. Lots of newspapers and broadcasters offer formal internship programmes – they are intensely competitive, sometimes with over a thousand applications for a single slot – but if you have something that will make you stand out from the crowd (more about that below), do apply. They’re an amazing route in.

More generally, ask if you can come in for a day, or even a week, to join editorial meetings and shadow journalists. Send a polite, well-informed and convincing email asking if this is a possibility to a journalist whose work you admire – not someone famous, someone who does a beat you know something about. Or try a commissioning editor – someone whose job title suggests they commission, edit or produce people who cover something you know about. Most won’t answer, but you may get lucky.

If anyone you know works for a media company, ask if they can set something like this up. They probably won’t be able to get anything lengthy – like two weeks – but they may well be able to call in a favour from someone in the newsroom to let you tag along for a day or two. That way you get some sense of how news works. You won’t get a job out of it but you will have a bit more clarity about whether journalism is for you.

Second: you have to stand out from the crowd. When I was a commissioning editor at The Economist I almost never used freelancers for anything I could commission a staffer for – why would I? The staffers were there, already being paid to write for me, and they were known quantities who understood our house style and editorial lines. Freelancers were for three things: 1, locations where I didn’t have a staffer – I used freelancers (regular ones are called “stringers”) all around the world for reporting in places we had no staffer; 2, specialist topics – for instance expertise in official statistics, the American Supreme Court, philanthropy by high-net-worth individuals and so on; 3, valuable and rare contacts or information about something or someone newsworthy or intriguing. 

That last one was rare. A publication like The Economist gives its correspondents specialist beats, and they quickly get a sense of where the news is. And being a correspondent for a big name opens doors. When you send an email saying: “I’m a staff journalist at The Economist and I’d like to talk to person X about topic Y,” you tend to get a positive reply.

Many other publications rely much more on freelancers. Somewhere less prestigious may be keener on unsolicited pitches, and more interested in stories that are local or otherwise too small for a national or international publication. But do your homework before pitching. If you’re hoping to write a story about healthcare for a paper that has a healthcare correspondent you’re probably wasting your time, unless it’s a very specialist story and you have the contacts or expertise, or you have insider information that even a specialist in the field doesn’t.

Third: you have to be pushy. Journalism is, and always has been, a job for thick-skinned, persistent, enterprising busybodies with a low boredom threshold. Even if you’re a staff correspondent no one tells you what the story is or how to get it – where you should be, whom you should talk to or what you should ask them. There’s no playbook. If you can sense that something is news, and you can get the story, then you’re doing it right. 

Getting random strangers to tell you stuff – sometimes deeply personal and private stuff – and turning it into something busy non-specialists who aren’t paying much attention will spend time reading isn’t for people prone to hesitating, second-guessing themselves or beating themselves up over imperfections in stories they’ve had to file to tight deadlines. You have to try your best, of course – but your stories are the first draft of history, at best. More often they’re just tomorrow’s fish-and-chip wrapper.

You can’t be too precious or concerned about rules, written or unwritten, either. There are always obstacles between you and the story, and you often have to think laterally – to ask around to see if anyone can give you a contact who might give you a contact; to go to place B as a substitute for place A when it’s inaccessible; to keep asking when you’re not hearing a Yes. If you can’t persist until you get a break, then journalism is probably not for you.

Fourth: nobody in journalism has the time or inclination for handholding. They aren’t coming to work to give aspiring journalists a chance; they’re coming to work to fill their newspaper/ magazine/ website/ channel with the best possible material that their audience wants, and without having to do major edits. You have to have something to offer them, not the other way round. 

The entire media industry is going through wrenching change. Advertising has dried up, edgy new sites and podcasters are taking ears and eyeballs, and the internet enables taxpayer-funded outlets like the BBC to provide a free alternative to everyone worldwide. The job I did at The Economist changed beyond recognition while I was there – 2005 to 2022 – and is still changing further. Many journalists (not at The Economist) are expected to turn around five stories a day. Commissioning editors must churn stories through faster and faster. Experienced subs and proofreaders have been let go. 

Staff jobs are mostly now 24/7, and even as workload has gone up pay has fallen. Freelance rates are lower in nominal terms – that is, not taking inflation into account; pound for pound or dollar for dollar – than they were a quarter-century ago. To drive that home, $350 is now a good rate for an 800-word story. Twenty-five years ago that story might have earned $500 or even $800 – roughly $900–1,500 in today’s money.

So you might ask yourself if this is an industry you really want to go into. There are still great jobs – I had one of them at The Economist, for all I say that the job changed a lot while I was doing it. There’s nothing like the buzz of being part of a committed team covering the news when it’s moving fast. I also loved being a foreign correspondent, for all that it was exhausting, sometimes lonely and constantly stressful. It gave me experiences and opportunities to see and learn amazing things I’d never have had if I hadn’t fallen into journalism. I don’t regret a bit of it.

In brief. Put yourself in the shoes of a commissioning editor and think realistically about what you can offer them. What is special about you? What, or who, do you know that gives you an edge? What newsworthy thing is happening that you know about but other people seem not to have noticed? Then craft an intriguing and impressive pitch – just a few paragraphs – identify the right person to send an email to – follow up (just once) if you haven’t had a reply in a week or so – and persevere.

And finally: lots of people who think they want to be journalists are actually analysts: they’re interested in what’s happening and why, sure, but they don’t actually love News.

My two favourite books about journalism – and two of the funniest books ever written – are Terry Pratchett’s The Truth and Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. (Don’t bother telling me it’s racist, I know. It’s of its time.) When News is Happening – doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad, just that it’s happening – and I’m feeling gleeful about it, I always think of the moment in Scoop when the hapless protagonist, Boot, who’s been sent to cover a foreign war in a case of mistaken identity, finally comes good.

“The general editor looked. He saw ‘Russian plot... coup d’etat... overthrow constitutional government... red dictatorship... goat butts head of police... imprisoned blonde... vital British interest jeopardized,’ it was enough; it was news. ‘It’s news,’ he said, ‘Stop the machines at Manchester and Glasgow. Clear the line to Belfast and Paris. Scrap the whole front page. Kill the Ex-Beauty Queen’s pauper funeral. Get in a photograph of Boot.’ ”

If that doesn’t give you the shivers, maybe journalism isn’t for you.