How student and professional journalists are rewriting the industry pipeline

For days, Yale University sophomore Megan Vaz couldn’t leave her bed or eat regularly. It was April, and the nauseating, sinking feeling in her stomach wasn’t from the flu or a failed exam. Her ailment was the Yale Daily News, the campus’s student-run newspaper. 

Earlier that month, in front of 50 peers, Vaz felt forced to disclose an incident of sexual misconduct she experienced during the speeches for the following year’s masthead elections. Several electors interrogated her about past comments on the topic. After Vaz lost her bid for editor-in-chief and became city editor, her peers’ judgmental attacks bled out into the newsroom, making her former journalistic haven emotionally untenable. 

By May, the pit in her stomach grew so large Vaz asked for extensions on all her final exams and avoided areas of campus frequented by YDN staffers. She resigned this September, becoming the second A-section editor to quit within two weeks. 

In a farewell op-ed, she attributed the resignations of at least four previous editors of color to what she said were toxic elements of the paper’s culture, including the racialized comments exchanged during elections. However, her choice didn’t come without reservations. 

Through the YDN, Vaz said she formed deep relationships with friends and the surrounding community while gaining invaluable reporting experience. 

And she added, “I was scared of what quitting would mean for my career in journalism.”

The Virginian Pilot, Chalkbeat, Minnesota Star-Tribune, and McClatchy publications, including The Miami Herald, are just a handful of many outlets whose internship applications either require or strongly prefer applicants with experience on a campus publication. For students interested in daily news reporting, this often means their campus newspaper. 

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s news editor, Sarah Brown, says student newspaper experience can demonstrate that applicants have been in the journalistic trenches, pursuing rigorous and original reporting.

But several former and current student journalists say this expectation sets back those who can’t afford the mental, emotional, academic, or financial toll student newspapers — imperfect institutions — may take. They say professional media outlets should lessen the pressure to build traditional resumés and be more explicit about what types of experience they want to see. 

Pressures of student papers

While editorship isn’t a common requirement for internship applications, the pressure for journalists within student newsrooms to pursue positions as a stepping stone to further their careers and show their dedication to journalism still exists. And competing ambitions can cause staffers to treat each other abrasively, resulting in a culture that harms both current and prospective staffers.

The YDN’s environment pressured students to chase editorship at the expense of basic decency, Vaz told The Objective. Annual masthead elections lingered in the backs of reporters’ minds, causing them to self-police their interactions for fear of offending the wrong people. Reporting assignments and coveted beats became grounds for combat. 

“From a very early time, you’re made aware that many people are shooting very high up, so you should be shooting high up too,” she said. “I didn’t think that until midway through my sophomore year. I wish I hadn’t.”

The YDN’s editor-in-chief and public editor published a response to Vaz’s op-ed, acknowledging that in the past four years, “the (election) process has caused candidates and News members anguish.” But staffers say it went further than “anguish,” with some of their peers using racialized comments so vicious that candidates of color quit the paper shortly after. One former editor of color, Issac Yu, wrote in a January op-ed that staffers from marginalized groups often had “their talents [sic] regularly underestimated and undercut, their ambitions questioned and derided.”

The pressure to chase editor positions hasn’t just come from contagious ambition. When publications like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal share their annual summer intern class announcements, students pick up one common thread.

“It seems that everyone who’s getting good opportunities are people who are EICs, managing, or desk editors at their college papers,” Vaz said. 

But this may just be correlation and not causation. Students privileged enough to have the capacity to be editors could also be building strong portfolios, according to several editors who review applications. 

Still, that’s not the only pressure present: Staffer jobs at school papers are often unpaid, and even for more senior reporters and editors who receive a stipend, pay is paltry. Student reporters must then split hours and make calls about whether they truly have the time to pursue unpaid experience — a phenomenon replicated in professional newsroom internships. 

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Related: Paid journalism internships are often the best chance to build a career. Are they enough?

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While serving as an editor at The Daily Tar Heel, her campus’s flagship newspaper, Heidi Perez-Moreno, a first-generation and low-income student, relied heavily on financial aid and income from multiple jobs to keep herself afloat. 

The pressure of balancing editorial responsibilities while keeping food on the table, paying rent, and maintaining academic scholarship status added a unique backdrop she said few other staffers at the paper shared. She knows multiple students who quit because they couldn’t afford to stay.

“I was always around staffers who had financial stability who could easily make the paper their full-time prioritization,” Perez-Moreno said. “Especially when I was managing editor, I found it even harder to stay afloat because of the added responsibilities.”

Though she contemplated quitting the paper or dropping out of UNC Chapel Hill because of the financial and emotional stress, Perez-Moreno added that she felt she needed the experience of a daily newspaper environment to prepare herself for full-time roles after graduating.

And granted, as a now-staff writer for the Washington Post, she uses the skills she learned at the DTH every day, writing on deadline and being flexible in a fast-paced newsroom. 

Perez-Moreno said the DTH’s prestige, history, and alumni network were several other factors that led to her keeping her role there, especially as someone with few prior professional connections. 

She doesn’t regret joining the campus newspaper but hopes that future editors create a more welcoming environment for low-income, first-generation, and BIPOC students so they can also benefit from the same resources. 

During her toughest moments there, she said, the people who supported her were the few who understood feeling like a fish out of water as a BIPOC staffer at a mostly white newspaper’s social events, or how her combination of financial, emotional, and professional stressors contributed to overall burnout. 

While affinity groups and inclusive recruitment practices are a start, Perez-Moreno thinks that increasing pay for staffers would relieve the pressure that low-income students uniquely experience. 

That’s echoed by others in the field. During Seattle Times assistant managing editor Stephanie Loh’s time as a sports reporter at the Daily Oregonian, she remembers staff pay being so low that students who worked jobs to support themselves were unable to dedicate the same time to the paper that their more privileged peers could.

“[College newspapers] can be the most valuable part of a college journalist’s experience because it simulates working in a newsroom,” Loh said. “But recruiters can also try to be cognizant of the fact that not everybody can afford to work at their college newspaper.”

“There’s not one way to become a journalist”

There is no industry standard for evaluating internship applications. To identify unique qualities between candidates, some outlets require autobiographical essays, thoughtful answers to prompts, or well-researched pitches. 

Now that Loh has a say in hiring practice, one way she assesses candidates is by prioritizing quality of clips rather than quantity. 

Loh said she respects the grit in internship candidates who vigorously pursue a unique path. When filling reporter roles, she added that experience and clip quality matter more than just holding a position itself: Three good years on the transportation beat will outweigh a series of editorships without solid clips. 

She frequently notices candidates trying to leverage editor positions or the name brand of their publications, but contrary to what students may believe, these factors rarely affect her considerations.

For Brown, the news editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, cover letters and interviews help identify intrinsic qualities of strong reporters: grittiness, natural curiosity, and an ability to question authority.

She attended UNC Chapel Hill and served as The Daily Tar Heel’s city editor and has been involved with The Chronicle’s internship hiring committee for six years. She said editors like her have a responsibility to open doors for those who don’t have the same privilege. 

“I don’t want student journalists to self-select out of putting their hat in the ring because they don’t have traditional experience,” Brown said. “That is a recipe for disaster for our industry. We have to bring in a wide-ranging group of voices and perspectives.”

While The Chronicle’s internship FAQ says candidates should have some experience in a college or professional newsroom, she confirmed this includes freelanced clips or articles published in non-newspaper campus media like a magazine or radio station. 

Opening up internship considerations beyond participation in the flagship campus newspaper may allow for a broader range of experiences to be represented in professional newsrooms. 

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Related: Journalism at small liberal arts colleges shouldn’t be inaccessible

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First intimidated by the unwieldy application process and late-night time commitments, Cecilia Garzella, now a data fellow at USA Today after graduating from the University of Texas-Austin last December, waited until the second semester of her freshman year to apply to write for the school’s paper, Daily Texan. Once on staff, though, Garzella found internal politics and the leadership structure of the student-run newsroom weren’t for her. 

“There was just a palpable sense of judgment and competition among the reporters and editors that just couldn’t justify me staying and working there for free,” she said. “ I wish I hadn’t put so much pressure on myself, because I could have saved myself a lot of grief.”

After writing a couple of articles, Garzella quit because of how unwelcome she felt in the newsroom. But it wasn’t an easy decision. She only made the choice after consulting family and close friends, and like former YDN staffer Vaz, was scared that by leaving, she was burning bridges or derailing her sole pathway into professional media. 

But she wasn’t deterred from becoming a journalist — she was also a journalism major and found it easier to receive mentorship from her professors. She showed up for office hours and put in effort for assignments, and a few of her professors saw her potential and connected Garzella to her first writing, editing, and podcast internships.

“I took an online writing class with a professor who was actually hiring an intern for the university’s in-house podcasts,” Garzella said. “She told me to apply, and I got it because she could vouch for the work I did in her class.”

During junior year, she said a data journalism professor noticed her passion for the topic and connected her to an opportunity at the Houston Chronicle as an investigative reporting fellow. There, she contributed to a front-page investigation about unsolved deaths in Texas. This opportunity snowballed into her current fellowship at USA Today, where she started as a Dow Jones News Fund intern. 

She also encouraged current college students to not be afraid of looking for opportunities outside the flagship campus newspaper. 

“There’s nothing wrong with joining the student newspaper, but I think there’s something wrong when people follow things blindly because they think, ‘Oh, this is what I’m expected to do,’” Garzella said.

Editors with experiences like Garzella’s — who were not a part of the campus newspaper for most of their college career — are working to make formal pipelines more open to candidates like themselves.

The Houston Chronicle’s senior editor of innovation Fatima Farha still remembers being told by student editors more than eight years ago that she couldn’t make it in the industry without The Daily Illini. 

She remembers because it was the day she quit.

Farha, then an assistant news editor on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s student newspaper, said editors demanded time she needed for academics and maintaining friendships outside the paper. It wasn’t just these demands that drove her away.

She was also the only brown person on her team and remembers white editors constantly asking her to smile more and getting upset when she wouldn’t join them for “DI Nights” (their weekly bar crawl) because she didn’t drink. 

She stuck with the paper for a year since she wanted to gain reporting experience. But the microaggressions, combined with increasing time commitments, just kept coming. The final straw was when editors berated Farha for not ending her summer break early to help with the paper while a white counterpart skipped out consequence-free. 

“Making the decision to quit was definitely scary at that moment,” Farha said. “But it was the right decision for me.”

Instead, she wrote and edited for UIUC’s mechanical engineering department and was a communications assistant for a lab on campus. Both allowed her to focus on her grades and social life, making for a fruitful college experience. 

Though she didn’t get major newspaper internships while in school, she earned the Pulliam Fellowship at the Indianapolis Star after graduating, which she says gave her connections that snowballed into her current job at the Houston Chronicle. Looking back, she doesn’t regret her choice to quit whatsoever.

Farha, who is now in a position to mentor the incoming generation, said she stresses to students that if the school newspaper doesn’t work out, that doesn’t mean editors like her will blacklist them for internship and full-time opportunities. 

Farha said that the editors who chose her for the Pulliam Fellowship clearly valued her experiences outside of the campus newspaper and that industry professionals should promote this mentality more.

She added that being a professional journalist is more than just checking off the campus newspaper box. 

Despite not staying at her campus’s newspaper, Farha was able to follow her passion for journalism through other opportunities like alternative, low-pressure student organizations or university-sponsored editorial positions.

“I wish students today realize there’s not one way to become a journalist,” Farha said. “A school newspaper can be like an SAT score — it feels like it matters so much in the moment, but there are other factors like outside experience and networking that matter in the long run.”

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Alex Perry is a fourth-year at Northwestern University studying journalism, economics, and data science.

This piece was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Curtis Yee.