Do You Really Want To Be A Journalist?

A PBS FILM CREW followed the staff of Penn State University's student newspaper, The Daily Collegian, for one year. The documentary airs on Tuesday on PBS.

Watch it. It sounds fascinating - the students deal with all the various difficulties (and triumphs) of professional journalists.

"The thing I love about newspapers is you have," one student says, "to do the work they give you every day, and every day is a new opportunity to do that."

"My favorite part of school was working at the paper. My senior year, I realized that. Our lives were the Collegian. My best memories are from it."

The paper's editor agrees, "The Collegian was my life."

But the editor, according to today's Philadelphia Inquirer, laments the public perception of journalists, characterized in the film by the paper's full-time adviser as lower than politicians, used-car salesmen and prostitutes.

"It really stings at first," he says. "But you get used to it, this us-against-them mentality on the part of the people you're trying to serve."

Do you really want to be a journalist? Think about why.

We have the greatest jobs in the world. But not everyone appreciates us.

Why do you want to be a journalist?