Journalism & Reporting: Can You Make a Career of It in 2025?

Today, we’re talking about journalism and its relation to freelance writing and content marketing. Many former journalists have found themselves on the marketing side of writing and are using those journalism skills to offer interview-based and research-based services, and digging deep into what's going on. 

Emma: Kaleigh has some experience in this area, as she writes a couple of columns. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the journalism work that you're doing, so everybody has the context going into the conversation?

Kaleigh: I've been doing journalism work for about seven years. I started out writing for Entrepreneur and Inc. Magazine and some of those business-type publications because some of the retail and e-commerce work I do overlapped there. And I also thought this would be great social proof for me to back up my writing skills. Eventually, I got a column with Forbes in the retail section. I'm a contributor; I'm not an employee or anything like that. I don't have a Forbes email address or anything, but that has been great because again, it's a way for me to build thought leadership.

I feel like there's a lot of Venn diagram overlap between the content writing work that I was doing and the journalism work. It's definitely a different flavor, but you use a lot of the same skill sets and it's been great for networking too. I get invited to events. I get to go speak at things. I get to moderate panels. I've made a lot of great connections through that. But I will be really candid and say a few things that I think are important to know.

I really don't make money off of my journalism work--not meaningful money in any way. It's not a business builder for me. I've never had somebody see that I have a Forbes byline and reach out and say, “We need you for content writing work,” which is what pays my bills. So it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. The only way that's ever happened and come true is through speaking opportunities, which is great, but again, not a huge moneymaker for me because I'm not known as a speaker.

Emma: Okay, but it's sort of related because it positions you as a thought leader.

Kaleigh: Yeah. It does. And it gets me in the room for a lot of interesting conversations.

Emma: I mean, here's the thing about journalism. So I was doing a little bit of research about this when we decided that we were going to do this episode. And one of the things that I did was to research journalism grad school programs because I was like, what are they actually teaching about in these programs? Is it like a traditional on-the-beat reporter? And I found that it's really, really not. And I want to get into that a bit about what I found with the grad school programs.

But first, I want to ask you: Do you think it is a viable career option? If so, how? And if not, I guess, why not?

Kaleigh: So two summers ago I was invited to speak to a classroom of graduate students at Columbia University in New York who were in the journalism program, and I was on panel about AI and the question of “is AI coming for our jobs?” I remember two years ago being very optimistic and saying these tools are here to help. What it kicks out is not good enough to use. These publishing companies, yes, they need high volume of content all the time, but they still need good reporters to conduct interviews and ask questions and fact check and do all these things that AI tools can't. 

Since then, it's changed, and I feel I've had to eat my words a little bit. I'm seeing these major publications like Conde Nast who are signing deals with OpenAI because it makes business sense for them to have AI generated content for scale, for speed, for all the things that are important for news outlets.

Emma: So are they using it for news? How are they using it? 

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Kaleigh: Yeah, we absolutely still need journalists for interviewing because obviously AI tools can't do that yet. But what I'm seeing is it's not an in-house position anymore. There are a lot of layoffs for the in-house teams. A lot of people are freelancing or contributing or kind of an editor at large where it's not a consistent paycheck or anything that you could kind of build a lifestyle around. I will also say this has likely always been the case. So even our friend Liz Wellington, who does some travel writing, she was like, for a lot of people, this is more of a hobby than a full time gig. So it's a lifestyle choice more than a career path it's starting to feel like.

Emma: Okay, so this is a good opportunity to switch gears into what I found with the graduate program. I think that it can be a career option, but not with writing and not in the way that we might expect. So first, I want to start by saying, what is journalism? Like, what is that defined by? 

I asked ChatGPT, and this is what it says about it. Journalism is the practice of gathering, verifying, and reporting news and information to inform the public. It involves investigating and presenting facts about current events, issues, and trends through various media formats. 

From there, I looked up a private option for education around Journalism. I started with a public option in the Midwest because that's where you are and I looked up a public option in California because that's where I am. So the first private option I looked at was Stanford because that is the local prestigious university near me. They have a one-year program, and the program is so incredibly technical. I was blown away when I saw what they teach. So they teach about how to turn data into stories. They also teach like beat reporting, source building, etc., but they're really focused on using multimedia tools to tell stories, including virtual reality.

So the technical aspects include audio editing, GitHub, HTML and JavaScript, databases and SQL, Python, advanced spreadsheet techniques, Tableau, GIS mapping, and Photoshop. This is not like I'm going to go out there and write stuff for a newspaper. This is like I am going to, like, data synthesis from the World Health Organization.

What do you think this class from Stanford, it is a one year program, costs? $73,638.

They noted that there's scholarships and financial aid available, et cetera. like You can you know do a TA assistant kind of thing.  This is not undergrad. I want to be clear. The one year graduate program.

I feel like if that was like most freelance writers or you or me and we wanted to like really lean into journalism and telling stories in that way, this is the kind of program that we might consider. I mean, the thing about Stanford is that like you're almost like buying the connections to like the people at Stanford and these skills are so incredibly technical.

And so that to me, I can see how if you're learning those skills, that can become more of a career because i can like I think that is the direction that journalism or news is going, right?

It's very technical. Okay, so I'm going to go, I'm going to pivot to these two. And I realize I'm the one talking here, I just have the research in front of me. So then I looked at University of Illinois. They have a one-year program. They also teach some of this stuff, but it seems much more traditional journalism to me. So they say investigative and immersion journalism, data analysis and visualization. So the data analysis seems to be key, science writing, social media, business reporting and diversity and ethics in media.

Okay, so why am I even sharing like this information about these master's degrees? Why does it matter? Do you need this? like I'm not sure that you need this, but I think the Stanford example is so, so interesting because it's ah very clear that this is not journalism as we knew it 20 years ago. This is a totally different, very technical, very digital-based approach, which I think is appropriate. And I would really be curious to talk to people in this program and hear what they ended up doing afterward; if they felt the investment was worth it. I’m curious--going back to the Columbia journalism students: did you have any conversations with them about what they were working on or what they were thinking about?

Kaleigh: Yes, so many of them were in this graduate program to become a journalist at some of the top tier publications, which I think is a very, very, niche collective of people. You think of publications who still really value high dollar journalism. These are places like the New York Times, The Washington Post, the but then also the magazines like the New Yorker, The Atlantic, places like this.

Even them, though, they largely operate with a freelancer network. So these are not people who are considering journalism their nine to five. It's something that they do. It's not their entire career path. And so the questions that the students had at this particular panel were: “Are we stupid for investing all this money in this education? Because like are we going to become obsolete the minute we get into the actual job pool?”

And the conversations we were having were: well, no, there's still a need for humans. It's evolved quite a bit. So fact checking, interviewing, copy editing, copywriting, all these things that are still critical to journalism work are important skills and they're viable skills within the job market. It's just the vision in your head of you sitting in a newspaper office is probably not what it's going to look like.

That's why I'm really interested to hear that the Stanford program had all these different skill sets that it's working in because I do feel like that's what modern journalism is becoming much more multimedia based, much more technology based. A lot of it is like, can you edit a podcast? Can you edit a video if we have somebody come in studio and record a sit down interview? So all these journalism adjacent skills are I think where people should be pouring their focus because that seems most viable from where I'm sitting.

Emma: Yeah, and I think the sort of traditional freelance writing on the beat is not so viable. And I think that is where you see lots of journalists coming into brand marketing and things like that because maybe it offers a better work-life balance and it's more lucrative. 

Kaleigh: I have even talked to somebody who had a pretty prestigious byline at a legacy publication and was an editor at large; even he reached out and was like, I think I need to get into copywriting. I've got to pivot because the income is not what it used to be. So everybody's feeling it from the people who are just entering the job field to the people who are pretty established and have great connections and great networks. Everybody's feeling the shift. And I think a lot of them are pivoting more into multimedia production. I think the thing I'll say about it is an education in journalism is always going to be useful because it teaches you critical thinking, it teaches you how to ask good questions and be curious which is valuable.

And so I don't think it's something that I would tell people not to study, but I would say go in realistic about what it is right now and how it's changing.

I think the other thing too is that I have been using my journalism background to find a foothold within the content marketing landscape. So I've been pitching more news and trends style pieces to my clients because the how to and the low hanging fruit of SEO, that's kind of long gone. And so much has changed with SEO, we're going to get into that. But a lot of companies now are looking for somebody to write super-engaging long-form LinkedIn content or to position them as the go-to expert on emerging trends and shifts in customer behavior within their industry, that's journalism. 

And so if you have that ability to develop a strong pitch, to understand and identify trends within data sets, so having an ability to annotate, analyze, and synthesize large data sets, which is exactly what you said that Stanford program is teaching people. If you have those skill sets, it can help you within your content marketing work. And that's kind of how I've kept my business afloat the past year and a half, honestly.

I think the other thing to keep in mind is that because social media is so much about developing a click worthy headline and attention grabbing and storytelling, I think that it's, it's valuable as a skill set for just social media in general and this era that we're in so many companies I'm seeing lately are asking for.

Are there people who are out there doing full time journalism work? Absolutely. I just think the pot is getting smaller and smaller. And so it's about finding new ways to fit yourself into that space and be useful and relevant and address the needs of the companies who are doing that type of work.