Navigating the Major That Doesn’t Exist
The debate over U-M’s nonexistent journalism degree
—By Erin Evans
When 2022 U-M graduate Kari Anderson met Hal Bernton as a high school freshman, he was a reporter for the Seattle Times and she was interviewing him for a career project. At the time, she doubted she would become a journalist. Still, she was surprised when he told her he didn’t recommend studying journalism as an undergraduate. He studied history and took on journalism in graduate school.
Bernton recommended this path as “it gives you a different [knowledge] base…and a kind of experience” before studying the technical skills involved in journalism, Anderson said. Though she didn’t expect to, she “ended up taking almost all of his advice.” At the University of Michigan, Anderson studied anthropology and is now getting a master of science degree at the Columbia Journalism School in New York.
Bernton’s advice to Anderson touches on a nationwide debate among liberal arts colleges including the University of Michigan: How should journalism be taught, if at all? Does knowledge of other subjects or an understanding of journalistic writing prove more valuable to students pursuing journalism?
Between 1993 and 1995, the University of Michigan eliminated their journalism major, along with the speech major. Their reason is not entirely clear, but it aligns with a shift among liberal-arts colleges toward focusing education on critical thinking skills rather than career-oriented or “pre-professional” degrees. Regarding journalism, this meant students dedicating their undergraduate careers to gaining a deep knowledge base rather than learning how to write a lede, get a good quote, or other technical skills.
Entering journalism from another background
Anderson does not regret her choice of undergraduate study. She doesn’t think she would have chosen a journalism degree if there had been one. It was important to her to explore her interests before learning the “nitty gritty” of journalistic writing, as she is doing in graduate school. During her time as a writer and Senior Arts Editor for the Michigan Daily, Anderson met other students who have since found their English or political science degrees immensely helpful as journalists, and Anderson herself sees anthropology as a sort of “long-term journalism”—entering and learning about different communities and cultures and writing about them in a non-biased way. At Columbia, she knows other students with varying degrees. One friend’s undergraduate theater studies gave him connections in New York for theater-related reporting.
“If you want to become a journalist writing about the environment, major in environmental studies or biology…. If you want to write about crime, get a major in criminal justice,” said U-M alum Phil Nussel. Nussel graduated in 1997, joined the University’s Board of Student Publications in 2004, and now works as online editor and internship director for Automotive News in Detroit. Then again, he admitted that people don’t always end up writing what they study. Nussel’s own degree is in political science, but while on the Daily, he wrote about sports.
Combining fields of study can help prepare students for journalism as well. Beenish Ahmed, a criminal justice reporter for Michigan Radio who graduated U-M in 2009, studied creative writing and political science, which she feels “combined, sort of equal journalism.” Paige Hodder, the fall 2022 Editor in Chief (EIC) of the Daily, admires the variety of disciplines that Daily writers study. Alexa St. John, a 2019 U-M graduate who studied computer science and the environment and was Daily EIC in 2018, agreed, mentioning that the news section often looked to writers studying biology or medicine to write about more complicated topics for the section’s science beat. Writers studying public policy and social justice were especially helpful in conversations about newsroom equity and inclusion.
Among the few journalism classes U-M does offer is one on environmental journalism taught by Emilia Askari and Julie Halpert, both working journalists. According to Halpert, a U-M alumna who studied English and communications, few students enter the class planning to pursue journalism. Halpert appreciates their diverse backgrounds, and some students have found a love of journalism in the class. One student came from a job in occupational hand therapy, connected with a documentary producer guest speaker, got herself a grant to work as the producer’s intern, and now works in public radio. One way to market yourself as a journalist, Halpert said, is to study something particular.
When talking to professional journalists before applying to college, 2023 Daily EIC Shannon Stocking heard much the same advice as Anderson: Study journalism, but get another major too, an area of expertise to increase your marketability.
Knowledge of a subject can only get a journalist so far, though. Kaleb Brown, who graduated U-M in 2021 with a degree in Creative Writing and Literature, now works as a trending news reporter for USA Today’s reviewed.com. He recently read a news story about the disproportionate number of women from minority populations who died during pregnancy. He was fascinated by the story, and while the subject matter interested him, it was the author’s storytelling ability that drew him in.
While studying a specific subject is helpful, Brown said, it “doesn’t teach you about journalism…. You need to know how to keep people reading.” This can be helped by studying the subject of a potential journalistic piece or taking creative writing classes, but Brown pointed out that this is simply “approximating the skills you need to write [journalistic] pieces.”
Specialized journalism programs?
When Anderson chose to apply to graduate schools, she chose Columbia in part for its arts criticism program, which many schools lack. While on the Daily, she fell in love with the newsroom, but also with arts writing. Fellow U-M graduates Brown and St. John agreed that more specific journalism majors and minors could benefit students with particular interests and potentially eliminate any lack among journalism students of deeper, non-technical knowledge of other subjects. St. John mentioned science journalism and investigative programs.
“That’s sort of the best of both worlds,” said St. John, “because you know the specific area that you want to focus on, and then you also get the journalism education.”
Pigeon-holing a journalism student into a particular beat from the start, however, could cause problems not only if they are still determining what they want to write about but also when it comes to finding a job.
Paige Pfleger, who graduated from U-M in 2015 after studying creative writing and literature and communication studies, now works as a criminal justice reporter for WPLN, Nashville’s NPR station. She’s covered arts and culture, been a general assignment reporter, and reported on health, science, addiction as well as criminal justice. While someone certain of what they want to write could benefit from specific programs, Pfleger said that the variety of writing she ended up doing meant that “to have had a more specific education and focus in college might have made that very difficult.”
For the same reason, Stocking finds a flaw in the belief that all students interested in journalism should study another subject. In most entry-level journalism jobs, she said, “you’re kind of going to be asked to do everything.” As a rising sophomore, this was Stocking’s experience while interning for Detroit Metro Times.
Anderson, despite her passion for arts writing, found security in Columbia’s wide range of journalism classes. Knowing that arts criticism, especially freelancing, was not the stable job she hoped for, she wanted to be able to learn other forms like news writing while also pursuing her interest for arts.
What are we missing if we’re missing a journalism major?
While Anderson may not have chosen to study journalism even if it had been offered, the lack of a major left Brown “perplexed” and Stocking disappointed. Current students and alumni can’t know what they would have gained or lost had they swapped their chosen degrees for journalism, but there are skills some feel they would have gained.
St. John interned at the Wall Street Journal while at U-M, and she saw advantages of the many students in her cohort who came from journalism schools.
“They’re embedded in [journalism] every day in their classes,” said St. John. “They’re immersed in the craft of story writing and sourcing and investigative journalism.”
In his experience hiring interns from both U-M and MSU, Nussel finds those from MSU’s journalism school more “polished.” They tend to understand more technical things, like libel law or how to clearly structure a journalistic piece. Stocking described a lack of knowledge of things like how to get and use a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on the Daily, which she knew would be taught in a journalism school.
In her communication and media classes, which range from redefining journalism in a post-Trump era to solutions journalism and the importance of news literacy, Stocking has learned about specific areas of journalism, but her assignments are academic essays. Halpert stresses the difference between these styles of writing. In journalism classes, Halpert said, students would learn to communicate clearly and concisely, to identify stories and distinguish what is newsworthy, to conduct interviews, and to construct stories so the average person can understand and is compelled to care.
To escape the prevailing assignments of academic writing, the clearest option seems to be the Daily. Hodder joined out of a desire to write more frequently and less academically. It wasn’t until she joined the news section that she considered journalism as her career.
Pfleger often worries about “the students who don’t have the wherewithal or the means to navigate a school without a journalism program. Are they really going to choose it as a viable career option if they have to…cobble [a major] together?”
What can students interested in journalism do?
U-M does offer journalism classes, but they are few and far between. Anderson wanted to take them but never could because they consistently conflicted with her schedule.
The University’s Residential College (RC) has tried to amend this. Former professor Susan Rosegrant, who retired after the winter 2022 semester, taught a narrative journalism class that both Pfleger and Brown spoke highly of.
Roughly when Rosegrant was hired, the RC implemented a digital storytelling track within the creative writing and literature major to give students more opportunities to explore journalism. Laura Thomas, professor and head of the RC creative writing department, called the track a way for students to “create as close to a journalism track as one can get at the University.” The track requires creative writing and digital media classes.
Stocking has enjoyed many of her journalism-related classes in the communication and media department, despite the lack of practice writing journalism. Brown found an immersion journalism class, which gave him a writing sample that he could use when applying for jobs, something which the academic essays written for journalism-related communications classes could not be used for.
Similar to the environmental journalism class, the University offers a community journalism course, but it disappointed Stocking. Being paired with a professional journalist from Bridge magazine was “amazing,” but because many of the students had no background in journalism and weren’t planning to pursue it, the class felt to Stocking like “the bare basics.”
For the most part, U-M students interested in journalism join the Daily. Halpert has also known students to join other campus publications, like SHEI magazine, or start blogs. This is where they get hands-on experience.
The one way we know to learn journalism
One common thread connected the thoughts of all students, alumni, and professors I spoke to: the importance of hands-on experience—as many put it, “learning by doing.”
“For a field like journalism,” said Thomas, “nothing beats experience.”
It was Anderson’s great uncle, a former Detroit Free Press reporter, who convinced her to join the Daily. She hadn’t considered it, despite more seriously considering a journalism career, and he told her, “If you want to even consider journalism, you have to try it first.” As he predicted, it wasn’t until she became an arts writer that Anderson discovered how much she enjoyed being in a newsroom.
At Columbia, Anderson appreciates how “they throw you into the deep end of the pool at the very beginning of the year.” On her third day of classes, her professor sent the class onto the streets of Harlem to practice approaching and asking questions to strangers. While writing a piece for one of her classes, Anderson called 27 pre-K centers in one day. She thinks that if she had studied journalism as an undergraduate, it would have been “here’s step by step, sentence by sentence, how to write a lede,” which she finds less valuable. Ahmed, too, was uninterested in a journalism major because she assumed it would take a “training approach.” Her journalism education came largely from a post-grad fellowship at NPR, where she got a “crash course” in journalism while working.
Among the students Pfleger speaks to at her job, the importance of learning by experience is widely considered the differentiating factor between a good and an inadequate journalism education.
“It’s hard to teach the craft,” Halpert said. Her class’s students choose a health or environmental topic at the start of the semester and work with their instructors to finish a polished piece by semester’s end. She and Askari gear the class toward “practical experience.”
Nussel sees a journalism major as unnecessary because “the real experience that you get is working in a place like the Daily where you’re hands on and you’re learning every day on the job.” Because of the Daily’s intensive journalistic experience, St. John was also unconcerned about the lack of a degree. The paper was a “perfect microcosm of experience.…You could be reporting every day or you could be speaking with sources every day. It really was a crash course of a real-life newsroom.”
Besides the Daily and the classes that do offer hands-on experience, students seek this education in another place.
Journalism internships
“When your school doesn’t have a journalism program,” said Pfleger, “you have to go seek it out elsewhere.”
In her junior and senior years, after deciding the Daily was not for her, Pfleger learned she could get credit for internships and started interning for Michigan Radio, a position she continued for her final two years of college. She calls the internship “the best thing I got out of my education,” because it propelled her toward her career in public radio. Brown interned with the Detroit Free Press as an undergraduate and believes this is largely what allowed him to get his current job.
Without a journalism major to convince internship directors to hire them, students often get internships as a result of their Daily work, said Halpert, mentioning St. John as an example.
But internships, as St. John said, “have their own issues.”
Anderson is not the only student at Columbia—known as one of the nation’s leading journalism schools—lamenting the difficulty of acquiring a journalism internship.
“All of us are still getting rejected even though we’re getting a…graduate degree,” said Anderson.
Internships, like student publications, are often unpaid or low-paying. Many internships require students to move, pay for housing, or own a car, making them impossible for many. The fact that many journalism jobs require internships, which often require or strongly encourage a journalism major, creates a barrier to low-income students in particular, which disproportionately affects students of color.
Despite not pursuing one herself, St. John said, “If someone can get a leg up with a journalism degree, get a better network, get that crash course in investigative reporting, or if they don’t have the opportunity to pursue student publications or internships during college, I think that’s a great way to go.” The existence of these extra-curricular journalism opportunities doesn’t abate their selectivity and the fact that they require a certain privilege to even consider. In an industry which, St. John notes, already has issues of equity and accessibility, a journalism degree could be instrumental for many aspiring journalists.
Where is the alumni network? Where are the connections?
For students of marginalized identities already facing increased difficulty getting a foot in the door to a journalism career, said St. John, a degree from a journalism school could give them the necessary network to help them succeed.
“The thing that was missing, that you do get in journalism school,” said Pfleger, “is the pipeline. You look at [internships at] an outlet like the New York Times — how many of those kids went to a journalism school at Harvard, and their professor knew someone at the New York Times?” In 2018, a study found that 65% of interns at seven top news organizations were chosen from highly selective schools. As Pfleger said, “Those connections in journalism are unfortunately extremely important to being able to get the job.”
While there are plenty of U-M alumni working in journalism, finding them is difficult because there is no formal journalism alumni network, as at schools with journalism programs. Pfleger gives her email to the students she speaks to and offers them the opportunity to shadow her at her job. She wants to do what she can to make the industry more accessible to people without those connections.
Besides her location in New York, which provides increased opportunities for networking, Anderson has professors at Columbia who work for publications like the New York Times and Bloomberg. This work with professionals is limited at U-M by the lack of a major. The community journalism classes are some of the few that offer this.
This is also where the Daily falls short in terms of journalism education. Hodder wishes students at the Daily could more easily find alumni and visit journalism conferences without needing to pay out of pocket. MSU’s journalism school, Hodder said, hosts conferences for the students, giving them not only insights from professionals but networking opportunities to help them when it comes to finding a job. Stocking similarly finds that the Daily cannot guide students when it comes to actually breaking into journalism and applying for jobs in the field.
Stocking uses LinkedIn to find internships and jobs and has paid to subscribe to newsletters that show her related opportunities. She has gone to the University Career Center but hasn’t found anyone there who understands the nuances of applying to journalism jobs. She finds it “interesting” that at a university with one of the largest student newspapers, she couldn’t find a professional development person to advise her on journalism applications even in the Student Publications office.
Is there a bright side to difficulty and inaccessibility?
Stocking’s dedication to seeking opportunities and help despite how disparate they may be represents the potential benefit to making journalism so difficult to pursue. For Pfleger, being at a school that “doesn’t have those connections already baked in” forced her to hunt for opportunities.
“In some ways,” she said, “that was probably a lot more valuable for me than if we did have a journalism program and I didn’t need to seek it out elsewhere…. It was a good motivator to try to put myself out there.”
When professors can’t make connections for students, the students have to work harder to find opportunities, said Halpert, but those are necessary skills for a successful journalist. Nussel has found that the Automotive News interns he hires from U-M often have superior problem-solving skills and are incredibly motivated, as they have been largely paving their own paths.
Then again, Pfleger has seen how this mentality leads to a “toxic notion that if you want to be a journalist, you have to be super driven.” She referred to tweets along the lines of “he won a Pulitzer because he slept under his desk for a decade,” and she feels this notion of needing to work oneself to the bone to succeed in journalism is especially prevalent at schools with no journalism major. While the pressure to seek out their own opportunities benefits some students, Pfleger thinks, it still limits accessibility.
Journalism in flux
Besides the benefits and drawbacks of not having a journalism program, what would make a good one? Journalism is constantly changing, which can be difficult for a curriculum to reflect. St. John’s reasoning for studying something different was largely that “with digitization [and] all of the challenges that the modern newsroom is facing right now…a J degree wouldn’t prepare me as much as pursuing a different degree and applying those skill sets to reporting.”
St. John’s concern that journalism curricula must “keep up with the times” is reflected in Stocking’s experience of the community journalism class at U-M. She found the class “outdated”; the professor told the students not to record during interviews because, it seemed, he didn’t know about the technology on their phones that could do so.
Student publications like the Daily, said St. John, avoid this pitfall. It’s easier “for a student newsroom to pivot very quickly than…a fully established institutionalized curriculum.”
Regardless, as Brown and Stocking noted, there is clearly an interest in journalism at U-M. The Daily’s staff of over 400 writers and editors are proof of that. While not all of them are interested in journalism as a career, many are, and all have at least enough interest to join the organization as students.
“I think students want a journalism major,” said Thomas. “I think faculty are interested in teaching journalism. I think there is a desire and a need for that.”
Not everyone can access a journalism school. Stocking came to U-M largely for financial and location reasons, not purely based on what programs it offered. Pfleger chose U-M because it offered the best scholarship. Whether a school has a student’s major or choice isn’t always the determining factor in where they can go.
As St. John pointed out, life experience can sometimes be just as valuable as journalistic training. She knows someone who went to culinary school before becoming a food writer, proving that different paths are not only common but potentially just as good as studying at a top journalism school.
But if the benefits of having no journalism major are merely benefits of studying other subjects, how valid is an argument based on taking away opportunities and making them more difficult?
“It would benefit not only our community,” said Stocking, “but society as a whole, if we dedicated more resources to educating journalists.”
Feature photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash.