Aspiring journalists must specialise, says Malcolm Gladwell. Try stats or accounting… October 20, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , trackbackFrom his interview in Time: "The issue is not writing. It's what you write about. One of my favorite columnists is Jonathan Weil, who writes for Bloomberg. He broke the Enron story, and he broke it because he's one of the very few mainstream journalists in America who really knows how to read a balance sheet. That means Jonathan Weil will always have a job, and will always be read, and will always have something interesting to say. He's unique. Most accountants don't write articles, and most journalists don't know anything about accounting. Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today, I would go get a master's in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that's the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter."
Comments»
Having a specialism in journalism is something I recommend to my students. You don’t have to know everything about a subject and you don’t need to have studied it at university. But you need to know enough to provide insightful comment and analysis and be able to place a story in the bigger picture. That’s your value to an editor.
What you specialise in is important. There is little demand in media for articles about goldfish or Morris dancing, for example. You need to choose something that features regularly in news agendas, such as housing, career and jobs, religion, transport, health, technology or new media.
Moreover, you can have more than one specialism.