5 tips for young journalists from J-School grads

By Ryan Levi

Wikimedia Commons image from user Mojourcomm

As part of my extensive summer reading list (highlights so far include Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams), I took a look through our Letters Home series, a collection of letters from J-School graduates to students currently studying at the finest journalism school in the world. Below are five big-picture takeaways from their letters.

Letters Home: Francie Williamson

Francie Williamson is content editor at The Gazette in
Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She graduated from the Missouri
School of Journalism in 2000 with a degree in print
and digital news (formerly the news editorial sequence)

The following letter was submitted Feb. 28, 2012

Be a sponge. And don’t leave early.

That’s what I would tell my younger undergraduate self if I could go back in time to December 2000. That’s when I graduated from Mizzou a semester early in order to beat the recession that I had a feeling was coming.

I was right about the recession, but I would have been fine staying another semester. Newspapers didn’t really start on their current precipitous decline until the middle of the decade.

I’ve been back to campus twice since graduating. I’m in awe and quite envious of all the things that have popped up not only in the journalism school, but at Mizzou as a whole in the last 12 years. In that time I’ve worked at five newspapers in South Carolina, Maine, Georgia and Iowa. I’m lucky to still be employed at one now.