Abstract
Why I’m a Journalist, edited by Aaron Chimbel, now dean of the Jandoli School of Communication at St. Bonaventure University, says on its back cover that it is a “collection for students interested in the field, novices engaged with building their careers and seasoned pros looking to learn from their colleagues.” Like many book promotions, this is both an overstatement and not quite correct otherwise; the book’s best value for seasoned pros probably is reminding burned-out journalists why they entered the journalism field and why they should stay. And the savvy career advice for novices building their careers is highly predictable: work extremely hard, show total commitment, and be willing to work anywhere and learn anything to build one’s career.
This book’s most obvious target audience should be high school and college students who are interested in the field or should be. The 39 contributors skew younger, and the essays all address how and when their writers became interested in journalism and/or how they got their first journalism job, whether it was before, during, or after college. This reviewer hopes, surely like its author, that this book is bought by parents for their children, by high school and college libraries and career centers for their students, and perhaps even by journalism professors to have handy, paraphrase, and cite. (It could also be a supplemental book for a basic news writing course.)
Chimbel organized invited essays, all two to four pages long, into sections titled (in this order) Public Affairs journalists, International journalists, Media journalists, Business journalists, Sports journalists, Print journalists, Broadcast journalists, Digital journalists, Journalism leaders, and Young journalists (the longest section, with seven essays), followed by “Afterword: My life in journalism” by Bob Schieffer. When this book was published, editor Chimbel was a professor at the Bob Schieffer College of Communication at Texas Christian University (TCU), and all of the “Young journalists” essays are written by TCU alumni.
That the first four sections are first and have those titles is surely no accident. Chimbel, himself a former television journalist with a journalism master’s degree from Columbia University, is clearly serious about serious journalism, at its best, being important to society. This reviewer surely would have made similar choices. But the book perhaps missed an opportunity for its desired audience to relate to it better with a section on “other beats” such as arts and entertainment journalists, travel journalists, fashion journalists, food journalists, and so on.
Chimbel also chose as contributors to this book only journalists, young and old, who have had outstanding careers, particularly young journalists whose careers took off like rockets due to a lot of hard work and a little luck. But young people today often seem of two other minds: that success can come easily without hard work, or that hard work is not worth it because it would not pay off for one reason or another. Regardless, Chimbel could have added some realism with a profile of a young journalist, happy or not, in a more typical/average position for their age and experience. This also would have perhaps taken into consideration more typical journalists who are not willing to do anything, go anywhere, and work any number of hours in an internship or poorly paid job.
The reader also must read this book, let’s say, in an appropriate frame of mind and perhaps in small doses, because reading 39 essays by individuals all explaining (bragging?) about their incredibly wonderful careers is a bad idea for the reader not quite in the right mood for that. In fact, reading this book in one sitting would be tedious due to so many similarities in tone, narrative, length, and meaning—especially the cliché that people become journalists because they are natural storytellers (rather than researchers, observers, analysts, persuaders, etc.).
Finally, for a book that prioritized journalism about public affairs, international news, media and business, the contributors are not always persuasive that their journalism is important. In a field distrusted by much of the public, that usually does not pay well, often has weird schedules, and too often has lousy managers, isn’t journalism’s importance, assuming one does important journalism, the most compelling long-term motivator? The mere fact that a journalist covers a big news event or interviews someone famous does not mean by itself that she is doing something important. The real question is: what difference did she make?