Newspaper Writing Builds A Resume

Working As a Journalist Is Useful For Many Career Goals

Jun 18, 2008

Newspapers can provide a fertile environment for a writer to learn the craft and develop style, voice, interview skills and an eye for tight self-editing.

Many famous authors began their professional writing careers working as newspaper reporters. Is that merely coincidence?

Hemingway At the Kansas City Star

Ernest Hemingway credited his time as a young reporter at the Kansas City Star for the precise, terse writing style that made him an international literary legend (For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea).

For years, the Star has dedicated a portion of its current Web site to Hemingway.

Included in that online ode to the man who, as a teenager, worked the less exalted beats of hospital emergency rooms and police stations of Kansas City, is a copy of the Star’s style guide likely used during Hemingway’s span there, 1917-1918.

Hemingway, like all Star reporters of the time, was expected to follow the rigid expectations set by the Star’s editors. Day in, day out and story after story, he practiced the techniques he’d become known for as a novelist:

It's been repeated that Hemingway once, after becoming a well-known author, told a colleague: The style sheet at the Kansas City Star included the best rules I ever learned as a writer.

Mitch Albom, Author and Newspaper Columnist

Current Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom is also widely known as a bestselling author who has published nine books – nonfiction and fiction.

Albom gained particular fame for his 1997 best-selling memoir, Tuesdays with Morrie. He topped the New York Times best sellers’ list with his 2003 novel, The Five People You Meet In Heaven.

He continues to juggle book authoring with sports and feature column writing at the Free Press. He also makes regular appearances on the weekly ESPN television program, "The Sports Reporters." He is a syndicated radio host, has written screen plays for film, and is a playwright. He also is a musician in a band with fellow writers.

All of it began with a degree in journalism and a career as a newspaper reporter.

How Newspaper Reporting Can Lead to Other Successes

No other job in writing demands so much quality output for so many readers on such a frequent basis. Editors and daily deadlines force a reporter to interview, interview, interview and to write, writer, write – then let it go, emotionally and mentally, to move on and try to do even better for the next day’s writing and deadlines.

Book authors, magazine writers, technical and public relations writers all have lots of time, by comparison, to revise and ponder. Though the practice in those genres also is valuable experience for a writer, the unpredictability of frenzied news rooms baptizes a writer under constantly tense conditions.

For Hemingway, that apprenticeship lasted only several months. For Albom, it’s been 20-plus years and counting. How long a newspaper reporter works in that training ground depends on what his or her goals as a writer are.

No matter the ambition, newspaper reporting can provide a solid foundation. It can show a writer how to work interviews, how to learn from an editor’s criticism and how to self-edit for tight, effective, colorful communication – all under the heat of deadline.

Newspaper experience can quickly create opportunities for travel and freelance writing. And using today’s technology, a skilled newspaper writer can expand to many other professions, as shown by Albom’s diverse career.

The copyright of the article Newspaper Writing Builds A Resume in Newspaper Journalism is owned by Adam Williams. Permission to republish Newspaper Writing Builds A Resume in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.