Q: When newspapers ask for X years of experience, does work for my college paper count?
A.S., Raleigh
A: Start with this: Newspaper editors don’t like to make mistakes. The surest way they can be sure of avoiding mistakes is to hire someone who has done well at a job similar to the one that is open. Any change — new beat, new city, new type of publication, new kind of job — raises the risk.
Editors ask for varying levels of experience because they want to see that you have proven yourself. Working at a college paper, typically run by students and where most (though not all) people work less than a 40-hour week is not analogous to a commercial newspaper where people do.
You can try arguing the point with editors, but you’re not likely to win, and prolonged protestations can hurt your chances.
That’s not to say that college experience is without value. Far from it. The college paper is where you got those clips, learned how to make deadline, learned to be accurate, picked up the jargon and determined that you might like to work in journalism. But the years you toiled are not equivalent to working in a professional newsroom — even if the standards at your school paper were higher than the ones you’ve seen out in the so-called "real world."
