All Posts Tagged With: "journalism school"

Freedom from Pain shows global War on Drugs hurting patients

Photo courtesy of UBC Public Affairs

A documentary made by University of British Columbia journalism students aired on Al Jazeera’s People & Power on Wednesday.

Freedom from Pain, which can be streamed here, shows how patients in developing countries suffer without access to legal painkillers, in part because the global war on illegal drugs like heroin has made legal opiates hard to find.

Students from the school’s international reporting class went to India, the Ukraine and Uganda for two weeks each.

In the Ukraine, they met a former KGB officer who was dying of end-stage prostate cancer and who slept with a gun under his pillow in case of unbearable pain. They showed how a young man risks jail to sell him narcotics.

The student reporters even get the executive director of the UN Office of Drug Crimes to admit on camera that his work causes pain and suffering for patients.

The first UBC International Reporting class won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting for their documentary Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground.

Peter Klein, who has worked for NBC’s 60 Minutes, 20/20 and Nightline, oversees the International Reporting course and was recently promoted to Director of the UBC Graduate School of Journalism.

On the bright side, no Canadian journalism graduate that I’m aware of has voluntarily starved themselves because they couldn’t get a media job.

As a graduate of the Carleton School of Journalism, I get a little e-mail in my inbox every Tuesday, which is appropriately titled Tuesday Topics. Yesterday’s edition was fronted with a little piece of news I found interesting, which was later written up for public consumption by a couple of Carleton profs:

Applications to Ontario’s degree programs in Journalism are down compared to this time last year, according to data released last month by the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre in Guelph . . . According to the OUAC website, www.ouac.on.ca, 3,576 applications were received as of July 8 for first-year admission to Journalism programs across the province.  That figure is 13.2 per cent lower than the equivalent last year.

Now, if you couple this with the fact that overall undergraduate applications to Ontario Universities has been steadily rising, it seems as though a reasonable inference here is that interest in an undergraduate journalism education is waning. And why might that be?

“I suspect the drop reflects to some extent the uncertainty in the journalism business as a whole, ” [Carleton journalism undergraduate supervisor Klaus] Pohle says.

The acting chair of Ryerson University’s School of Journalism, Suanne Kelman, agrees the poor job market is responsible for the drop in interest in journalism programs.  In an email she wrote: “Surely fears about future employment would be the major factor. That would explain why applications are down across the province – if it were just us and Carleton, I might assume that the wider range of choices played a more importance (sic) part. I think that students and their parents are being affected by the concerns over the future of journalism.”

Well, no kidding. Since I graduated in 2007, I have worked for three major daily newspapers and not once did I have an actual job with things like benefits. Moreover, I was extremely lucky to be able to score that many internship positions, which are rare and getting rarer. Just to draw from newspapers I worked at, when I was a summer intern at the Edmonton Journal there were seven summer intern spots; now there are four. The Ottawa Citizen used to have six year-long interns at a time, I believe they are down to either one or two. The vast majority of the friends I made in school didn’t even try to work in the journalism industry or, if they did, have already given up and pursued another career path, which, I would be remiss not to mention, they were all aided in by their journalism degree.

To be clear, I loved pretty much everything about my undergraduate experience. The profs at Carleton were fantastic both for imparting knowledge and having working-journalist connections, I made amazing friends, I learned skills of both life and work varieties, etc. So to say all those things and recommend against taking an undergraduate journalism degree would be a pretty dick move, which is why I’m not going to do it. What I am going to do is proffer some advice to people who want to be journalists and are considering an undergraduate journalism degree.

What a journalism undergraduate degree will get you are amazing memories, good connections with profs who know hundreds of working journalists, marketable skills in the form of writing and communications abilities. What it will not get you, and what no one ever promises it will get you, is a job in journalism.

To be clear, in my recollection, no one at j-skool ever lied about this, either. I’m pretty sure that from literally day one, lectures included messages from profs that, if you wanted to get a job in journalism on the other side, then you were going to have to hustle outside of class. A journalism degree on its own is never, ever going to get anyone a job in media. Students newspaper experience, community radio, working for small-town media, free work placements, academic exchanges and, at this point, extra curricular web experience are basically mandatory if you’re interested in hunting for a job.

Now, this was all made clear to us. An interesting counterpoint to that strategy, appropriately enough for this blog, are law schools in the United States. The legal job market in the States tanked during the recession and, accordingly, recent grads are extremely hard pressed to find work, not unlike journalism grads in Canada. There are several key differences, though, particularly that there’s a large movement in the States that put forward that American law schools actively lie to potential students about hiring rates to “trick” them into paying exorbitant, six-figure amounts for their degree. (Another key difference there being that  you can get a whole undergraduate journalism degree for less than the cost of one year at an American law school.) Some people view it as so bad that they are apparently willing to go on a hunger strike in a bid to get American law schools to be more transparent about hiring figures and job market realities.

So, you know, on the bright side, no Canadian journalism graduate that I’m aware of has voluntarily starved themselves because they couldn’t get a media job and felt that it was their school’s fault. But that doesn’t mean it’s not exceedingly challenging to score a media job. This doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t apply for undergraduate journalism degrees, it just means that, if they want to be a journalist, they should be aware of what’s in store and adjust expectations appropriately.

Could we all please just respect journalism ethics?

Maybe it’s because I just finished my final paper for Ethics of Journalism class (the BEST class I have ever taken, I might add, and an important one to boot) but I feel like lately, I’ve been seeing  an elevated number of sketchy ethical, journalism-related situations cropping up.

I was perusing my feed on my newly-acquired twitter when I spotted a story posted by CBC Ottawa.  Apparently the Kanata Kourier Standard in Ottawa (clearly a standards-setter for journalistic and grammatical excellence) has decided to stop publishing a weekly column by a local city councilor.  The column has been running for thirty years, and Councilor Mary Wilkinson is upset because, she told the CBC, “she uses the column to inform constituents and generate feedback about upcoming issues”.

OK, so maybe it was a little bit abrupt for the Kanata Kourier Standard – it hurts me every time to type in that second K – to pull the column without informing Councilor Wilkinson, but I’m more concerned about the fact that the column existed in the first place.  Journalists should, as Bob Steele, journalism ethics professor for the Poynter Institute says, “Act Independantly.” They should, “Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise your integrity or damage your credibility” he tells us.

Thanks Bob.  Now, as an important role of the media is to inform the public so they can make solid decisions and maintain a democratic society, I would suggest that such a close relationship with a politician is an association to avoid.  I see the merit in a guest column, perhaps, in the editorial section, preferably when the need arises for a response by the politician to a specific issue.  However, this relationship they’ve cultivated was a little too close for comfort.  I applaud the KKS for pulling the plug.

According to CBC, publishing weekly columns by local city councilors was practiced across the city in community papers, until the Ottawa Region Media Group decided to use the space to, you know, cover more local news. What an idea.

Councilor Wilkinson, still bitter, suggested the city could consider discontinuing advertising with the Kourier Standard.  Hey, editor: make amends with the rude councillor by replacing her advertisements with column inches on city hall.  Give the public something real to chew on – instead of letting politicians spoon feed their messages to constituents.

How I put myself through school by writing to two of the richest men in Canada

In September 2005, I left Toronto for grad school in Berkeley. In my bags, along with a copy of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and several pairs of regulation California flip-flops, I had two cheques totalling $26,000. The cheques were from Canadian millionaires I’d never met. They’d promised to send me money to pay for grad school, provided I write to them once a month. They also asked me to keep the arrangement confidential.

I kept half of my promise.

What follows is the story of how one girl (me) put herself through school by writing to two of the richest men in Canada.
April 2005. I was at my friend Rachel’s house, sitting at her kitchen table with Shuah, her lovely bespectacled friend. It was a spring day in Toronto.

I needed money. Not for an abortion or a car or anything ghastly like that. I’d just applied to one of America’s most expensive graduate schools and had gotten in. They were offering me $5,000 in scholarships, which would cover the cost of coffee and sunscreen for a few months. I needed more, and I needed it fast.

“Who has money?” I asked, into the air.

Rachel and Shuah looked at me. “Rich people have money,” Rachel said.

We didn’t have any money, that was for sure. Rachel was dating a soft-hearted grad student from a poor town in the Maritimes and Shuah was law-school-thousands-of-dollars-in-debt-poor. Me, I was still paying off student loans from my undergrad years at McGill.

My mother worked a government job at an arts agency, and though she would have given me her last cent even if it meant she’d have to live in a tent across the street, she couldn’t spare much. I needed $40,000 at least. My dad was a full-time writer. He’s also pretty successful, but he’d just gotten married and bought a house and I knew every cent was headed in that direction. I needed to widen my contacts. I needed rich people.

“Okay, so how do I get money from them,” I said.

We mulled it over.

“I suppose you could just ask them,” said Rachel.

A scheme started to take shape. I knew I could write a funny letter if I needed to. I also knew from reading magazine profiles of millionaires and from watching Annie that rich people were often eccentric. I did some creative visualization, Shakti Gawain style: I pictured a big man sitting in a chair, reading my letter, and reaching for his chequebook. I pictured him calling out to his secretary: “Put this in the mail, Gladys. This girl’s got spunk.”