Scary thought about the next crop of young journalists...

Like this is new. Get me numbers from the old days and compare; I bet it's equal.

 

To me, the good kids today are better than the good kids from 20 years ago -- better at tone, observational detail, just more sophisticated. At the same time, the hack kids are worse than they used to be, just bad with the language.

 

High school is complete bullshit. There's no bigger waste of time on God's green earth. But there's something troubling about being so cavalierly selective in what you can cheat.

 

I'm (surprisingly) going against the grain on this one, but I NEVER made shit up for J-school classes. Seemed a stupid thing to do, considering you're supposed to be learning how to do it for real, and all.

There were a couple of times I would have liked to make something up, because I felt like a jackass calling busy people to interview them for something that would never be published. But I just couldn't do it.

 

I was the same way... More than once I pissed a few people off who sat for an interview only to ask later, "So when is this running?"

"Oh, it's just for a class..."

 

Yeah, I was the same as Barsuk and Mizzou in that I wouldn't make up stuff, and if I didn't get callbacks — and sometimes I wonder how j-schoolers do with their schedules and the fact that no one wants to talk to them — I'd just run with what I had, even if it meant taking a hit on an assignment, that's reality.

I can't think of how many people I knew in j-school who would call friends or make up sources for school assignments. I do think a lot of them knew better when it came to actual work, but it's a slippery slope really.

 

I'm 11 years out of college and I should save this for my stock smartass answer for next time someone asks me.

 

What did your friend do to the six students?

 

I did the student paper/j-school double-duty, but I found a way to get both done at the same time. The paper expected me to keep three or so features as "back-ups." If my story fell through or if someone else's story fell through, they would have something to fill the hole in the paper with.
So whenever I got an assignment, I made calls identifying myself as "Appgrad05 from Daily Shitrag ..." and got what I needed. Then it just went in my file of back-ups. When I had to do a news story, I'd dump it or let the paper use it as an online-exclusive.
My professors thought it was great that I was putting so much work into my stories for their class, and my editors thought I was a godsend.

 

Scarier thought (to me ...) they're not much older than my oldest niece.

 

He wasn't allowed to do anything other than give them Fs for the assignment. Four of them were allowed to drop the class... Apparently, the dean was pissed at my buddy for checking out the stories, which obviously speaks volumes about the J-school...

 

I never made anything up for the classes or for the student paper. I had an editor who thought I did cause I got quotes that were more than the regular coach bullshit. I just told him you have to ask the right questions.