Sunday, January 4, 2009

Well, that explains everything

After several months of trying to figure out what Conor Friedersdorf's problem was, now I see:
I graduated from college in 2002, when newspapers really were skeptical of blogs. By 2004, I was being paid by a Media News Group paper to blog full time. In 2006, I attended a top flight journalism school where professors forced students to blog, new media guru Jay Rosen constantly harped on the need for newspapers to innovate, and almost none of my peers, all people who sought journalism degrees, had any objection to blogging. (Emphasis added.)
Let that be a lesson to you young people: Whatever else you do, avoid journalism school. Unless you plan to be a first-round pro football draft pick like Joe Namath, or a future president of the United States, like Sarah Palin.

It would be impossible to compile a list of famous journalists who never attended journalism school, because it's pretty much all of them. If you want to be a journalist, the first thing to do is get a job at a newspaper -- sweeping the floor or driving a delivery route, if that's all they've got -- and go from there. My first newspaper job, I got paid $4.50 an hour and, yes, my duties included driving the delivery truck on Wednesdays.

As to blogging, why in God's green earth would a blogger pay money to go to journalism school? Just open up a Blogspot account and get cracking. It ain't rocket science. Hell's bells, even lawyers can do it.

(H/T: Instapundit.)

UPDATE: Now that I think about it, welcome to the Robert Stacy McCain Blogging Academy. The curriculum:
Most people don't have what it takes to survive AB301.

UPDATE II: In the comments, Conor informs us that he got free tuition to J-school. See what I mean? They have to give the stuff away.

UPDATE III: An "uncommonly naked expression of the Sarah Palin right" -- see? It's not like Conor hasn't learned anything: naked+sarah+palin = mega-traffic! Not as good as naked+glenn+reynolds perhaps . . .

7 comments:

  1. Prior to reading this post i have all ready taken your advice. You sir are a genius and I thank you for it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. so.. where does Andrew Sullivan come in at?

    ReplyDelete
  3. He got paid for it?

    Isn't that illegal?

    ReplyDelete
  4. So Jay Rosen is pushing blogs now. What did he ever do? Yes, I know who he is, I had him for a professor 18 years ago. He was a butthole then. That school was over priced and over rated then. At least Jon Katz was entertaining.

    ReplyDelete
  5. But I did get a newspaper job before I went, and I didn't pay -- they gave me free tuition.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "INTERMEDIATE BLOGGING 201 -- Downloading photos, embedding video, Christina Hendricks."

    I think most teenage boys will be able to breeze through this class..

    most men too..

    ReplyDelete
  7. I was once actually accepted to the University of Kentucky as a journalism major. Thank you for re-affirming my decision to join the US Navy for six years and to get an electrical engineering degree after my term was over.

    ReplyDelete