You are a writer, a journalist, a creator. You tell stories about space exploration, environmental policy, cancer genetics, and other hard subjects that your editors don’t grok but your readers are thirsty to understand. You have a decent newsroom job, or a set of clients who run your freelance work. But you’re vaguely unsettled about your future, and you’re interested in making some kind of creative leap—maybe starting on a book, or telling stories in a new medium, or learning a new science. You believe that science and technology are cool and important, and that citizens need to understand how they work and what they produce. This belief is at the core of your vocation; you want to keep doing it, and getting better at it.
If that’s all true, then you have 18 days left to apply to join the 2015-16 class of Knight Science Journalism Fellows at MIT. And I’m going to take a few minutes to explain why you should.
First, let’s not duck the fact that it’s a challenging time to be a journalist. If you follow the angsty future-of-journalism debates on Twitter, you know that economics reporter Felix Salmon, late of Reuters and now at Fusion, shared a letter to young journalists yesterday trying to talk them out of their career choice. While the new wealth of outlets offering high-quality work makes our era a great time for journalism, he argued, it’s a terrible time to be a journalist.
Attributing his own success mostly to luck, privilege, good timing, and his natty British accent, Salmon bluntly advised the next generation that “journalism is a dumb career move.” There may still be a market for strong journalism, but with talent so plentiful and capital so scarce and concentrated, “I have no faith that the individuals creating that great journalism are going to end up getting paid anything near what they deserve — or even that most of them will be able to build a career out of it,” Salmon wrote.
While Salmon has a point about the daunting prospects facing entry-level journalists, it’s important to put his argument in historical context. Journalism was never a profession for the avaricious. And it has been on its alleged deathbed for so long now that Salmon’s letter would have made almost as much sense in 2005, or even 1995, as it does in 2015.
Yes, there is a great shift in media economics underway. It’s not an exaggeration to call it tectonic, in the sense that the old media chains and their advertising- and subscription-supported businesses are, like the earth’s crust in subduction zones, getting sucked under, melted, and reconstituted. The heat driving the process, in this case, isn’t coming from the planet’s radioactive core, but from billions of Internet servers, wireless routers, and mobile touchscreens, and from the scramble to sell advertising impressions by filling these channels with catchy content, whether original or remixed.
Like the movement of continental plates, this media transition is wrenching, but it’s also gradual; it’s playing out over years and decades, not months. The key thing for journalists—whether young, middle-aged, or senior—is to understand and monitor the process, ride out the quakes, and be ready to jump to the new islands of activity emerging in the industry’s hot spots and spreading centers.
The specific skills journalists will need to excel in their future jobs are changing. Salmon is right to point to “the creation of moving images, be they two-second GIFs or two-hour immersive features,” as one of them. But whatever new storytelling technologies come along, good journalists will have to cultivate the same set of core talents. Those include an interest in people and processes; the ability to weigh leads, talk to sources, and pull out their stories; a sense for how to tie the details together into a narrative; some deftness with language or imagery; and a commitment to accuracy and fact-checking. Over time, journalists must also build up a body of knowledge and experience and a network of expert contacts, so that they can deploy all of the other skills faster, on deadline when necessary.
When journalists take vows as science, technology, environmental, or medical reporters, they commit to an even higher standard. The experts behind the stories are harder to talk to. The body of background knowledge required is larger. The stories themselves are more complicated, and their practical import is often harder to pin down.
On top of all that, science writers serve an anxious and fragmented public, at a time when political leaders seem unwilling to address (or even acknowledge) existential crises like climate change, and when anecdote, fear, innumeracy, politics, and cognitive biases seem to conspire to open science’s clearest commandments—like thou shalt vaccinate thy children—to dissent and debate.
It’s for all of these reasons that programs like ours exists. For an experienced journalist, a nine-month university fellowship like the Knight Science Journalism program offers a priceless opportunity to validate one’s career choice and build confidence, competence, and connections. (KSJ’s founding director Victor McElheny calls these “The Three Cs”). A fellowship year, whether it’s at Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, or MIT, is always a space in which to master new skills, learn from top professors and peers, and gather the energy to tackle future challenges. But for journalists interested in science and technology, there’s no better setting for this pursuit than MIT, with its panoply of world-leading research labs and its spirit of hands-on innovation.
The Knight program isn’t designed to serve the beginners Salmon addressed. (For them, MIT has another terrific option, the Graduate Program in Science Writing within the Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program.) Rather, our program is for professionals who have already made the fateful commitment to journalism and are building a career out of it, Salmon’s pessimism notwithstanding. That said, I don’t like to use the term “mid-career” to describe our offering, because it’s getting harder these days to say how long a journalism career should last, or when one has reached its middle. This year our youngest Fellow is in her middle 20s, while a couple of our more experienced Fellows are in their mid-to-late 50s. A journalism fellowship is career adrenaline; it works whatever your age. It’s our privilege here to be able to affirm the world’s top science and technology journalists in their chosen roles, and to provide experiences that will help them be even more successful in their second act—or their third, or their fifth.
I have faith that individuals who know how to tell great stories about science, technology, health, and the environment will find a way to get paid what they deserve. To help guarantee that, we pick a few of them each year and provide the safe space and the free time they need to try risky projects, explore long-neglected passions, meet new people, absorb new ideas, and learn new digital skills. Hence the new project option in the 2015-16 Fellowship program, our annual series of seminars with top scientists from MIT and Harvard, our field trips to the capitals of New England’s science scene, and our ongoing series of digital media training workshops in areas like videography, video editing, animation, and data journalism.
I think Felix Salmon is a perceptive guy, and I wish him well in his new venture at Fusion. But for the health of democratic societies, I’m counting on journalists young and old to ignore his advice. I’m idealistic enough to believe Joseph Pulitzer’s words: “An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.” Trained intelligence is the key phrase—both at Columbia Journalism School, where Pulitzer’s words are inscribed on a bronze plaque, and here at MIT, where the Knight program aims to support science and technology journalists in a challenging but fundamentally optimistic career choice.
Our application deadline for the 2015-16 Fellowship is midnight on February 28. (Three letters of recommendation are due at the same time.) So go to https://fellows.knightscience.org/apply/ and get started now.
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