Posted: 7 September 2012
Country: UK
The Guardian‘s journalist writes about how she got into the profession “thanks to a surprise inheritance”. “I’d struggled for years with low-paid jobs as I couldn’t afford an internship”, says Alexandra Kimball in The Guardian.
She says that money is necessary to launch a creative career and questions what kind of profession journalism in the UK is.
“This is about more than money; it’s about class. I didn’t always understand this. When I was struggling, I suspected that my failure was due to lack of funds. I’d transcended my blue-collar roots, I thought: I’d been to university; I didn’t work, as my mother might say, “with my hands”. And I blamed myself. I told myself I wasn’t trying hard enough, that I was too impatient. I saw this in my failure to pound out essays after long days at work, and in my weird, jagged career trajectory. I wondered if I was too lazy, too restless to succeed, not cut out for the kind of heels-dug-in effort that creative careers require”, writes Kimball in The Guardian.
“To be a writer in this market requires not only money, but a concept of “work” that is most easily gained from privilege. It requires a sense of entitlement, the ability to network and self-promote without seeing yourself as an arrogant, schmoozing blowhard. And it requires you to think of working for free – at an internship, say, or on one of those gratis assignments that seem to be everywhere now – as an opportunity rather than an insult or a scam.
It’s difficult to believe now, but journalism wasn’t always an elite pursuit. My grandmother was a journalist; she got her newspaper job with an application and a folder of clips from her college paper. In early high school, I babysat for a columnist who advised me to “keep knocking on doors.” These were people from the era of pounding the pavement, and from them, I got the impression that journalism was a gettable, middle-class job. Why wouldn’t it be? My grandmother wrote about public housing and mortgage rates”, says The Guardian.