By JULIE HAVERMAN
Alumni News staff
Long deadlines, normal working hours and the chance to fully explore a topic.
Many students might think those things will be beyond their reach when they step into a journalism career. But these are the perks of the magazine business, several NU College of Journalism and Mass Communications graduates said.
“I’ve always had a preference for magazines even though I'm supposed to be a newspaper die-hard coming from the J-school,” said Tom Mainelli, a staff writer and copy editor for Lincoln's Sandhills Publishing.
Several NU journalism graduates who are editorial staff members at the Sandhills said they thoroughly enjoyed the magazine business and felt NU's journalism program had prepared them well for their careers.
Sandhills Publishing, at 120 W. Harvest Dr., publishes several electronic communications and consumer magazines a month, including Smart Computing, PC TODAY and Machinery Trader. Four of Sandhills’ 17 editorial staff members are graduates of NU’s journalism program.
“One of the things I've always liked about magazines, generally speaking, is that there is more time to work on an individual story. So most magazines allow you to go more in depth than the average newspaper story,” said Mainelli, who graduated from NU in 1994, having majored in news-editorial.
Editor-in-chief Ron Kobler said Sandhills' reporters usually have about a month to work on any given story. Kobler, a 1981 NU graduate, said that allows reporters to do extensive research and is often more rewarding than hurriedly gathering information for a newspaper article.
“For us, it’s not something where we're running out and getting a news article and throwing it into something that's going to appear the next day. We're going out and doing a lot of background research, putting together material, doing lots of interviews and developing that content. We're trying to massage it so that it really is the best content possible for our audience,” Kobler said.
Although newspapers do have feature and in-depth reporters, Trevor Meers, a publication editor at the Sandhills, said it usually takes a long time to work up to a feature writing position at a newspaper. However, a magazine reporter gets assigned in-depth stories as soon as he or she starts working at a publication. That appeals to a lot of recent college graduates, said Meers, a 1995 news-editorial graduate.
Meers also said the “sane” work hours at a magazine, such as Sandhills, were a big benefit for journalists. “The personal schedule is a lot better in the magazine business. It has more traditional office hours like 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. instead of a newspaper's schedule,” Meers said.
“Personal scheduling is a big factor for students coming out of college. They’re trying to mesh a somewhat normal lifestyle with a job, which can be tough when you have a schedule where you work every evening and you get Tuesdays and Fridays off or something like that,” he said.
But a somewhat normal work schedule doesn't take all the pressure off magazine journalists. Meers said magazine writers might even face more pressure than newspaper reporters; it's just a different type of pressure.
“At a newspaper there's pressure each day because you have a deadline and a close every single day. But when you go home at the end of the day, you’re pretty much done. You don't have to think about it until you go in the next day. At a magazine, you're dealing with monthly deadlines, and your deadlines are longer, so they tend to weigh on you a little more because it's never really done. It’s an ongoing process for a month at a time, and then you actually juggle three or four issues simultaneously,” Meers said.
When interviewing potential employees, Kobler, who hires the editorial staff, said he looked for people with fundamental editing and writing skills, as well as people who could meet deadlines.
Kobler hires writers who possess fluid writing styles, can structure sentences correctly and integrate materials from interviews into their work, he said.
In editors “we try to locate people that are very meticulous in their work and that are kind of fanatics about the English language,” Kobler said.
The NU journalism college produces students who possess these skills, Kobler said.
The journalism college teaches students how to structure a story, how to conduct interviews and how to integrate interview material into a story, Kobler said. But perhaps the most valuable skill the journalism school teaches its students, he said, is resourcefulness, which is necessary when working for any publication, including a magazine.
Kobler said, the college “drove home that you had to be resourceful in how to get information, package it and get it all put together by deadline.”
The journalism training Mainelli received from the university has helped him throughout his writing career, he said. Mainelli learned at the journalism school that accuracy and meeting deadlines are crucial, he said.
In fact, Mainelli said he thought his training as a journalist gave him an advantage over other writers who had majored in different areas, such as English.
“In journalism its pounded into you that you get it right or you better feel pretty bad about it. Not to take anything away from the folks who don't have a journalism background, but I think that they come by that on the job where as we already have that,” he said.
Meers said he felt that his education at the university's journalism school emphasized the importance of responsibility in school as well as the workplace. “The J-school really hammers home the importance of responsibility, and by that I mean deadlines,” he said.
The professors expect students to meet deadlines, know certain rules of style and conduct good interviews, and if someone doesn't do that the professors point it out.
“So many people come into a job situation unprepared to understand that they’re at a job and their production affects the profitability of a company, so the company expects a lot out of you. The J-school gets you used to measuring up to certain standards, and that's really important,” Meers said.