Choosing journalism as a second career
For decades, the internship program at Montreal daily La Presse has been a pipeline into a newspaper career for graduates of Quebec’s top journalism schools. This year, however, internship co-ordinator Marie-Claude Mongrain decided to dip into another talent pool – people who have studied in other fields or chosen journalism as a second career.
Starting in January, participants will get the chance to learn from award-winning investigative journalist and author Katia Gagnon the basics of journalism, including ethical challenges, legal considerations and the art of the interview. They’ll also “learn by doing,” shadowing several La Presse journalists who will serve as mentors and will potentially see their best pieces published with their own byline. Interns will also become eligible for the regular La Presse summer internship program at the end of the 10-week, part-time “boot camp.”
“With our regular internship program, you essentially replace a journalist. After a week, you have to be ready to go in the field and cover things,” Mongrain said. “We picked a lot of candidates who had studied in journalism, who had already developed that (quick turnaround) muscle … and we had really good candidates, but we found we were setting aside people who could have brought new ideas, interesting perspectives, because they hadn’t studied journalism.”
Despite the never-ending drumbeat of disheartening headlines about job prospects in journalism – more than 1,200 media jobs cut in Quebec alone in 2023, and threats by a Conservative government-in-waiting to defund English programming at CBC/Radio-Canada and potentially end subsidies for struggling local media outlets – the paper received more than 300 applications for five spots in the January program, mostly from students but a few from people aiming to start second careers. Mongrain said she expected 50 or 60. “It makes me feel good as a journalist to see that 300 people want to learn about journalism – it shows great curiosity, and it shows that journalism is still relevant. It’s very, very encouraging.”
For Gagnon, the interns will hopefully “bring knowledge that most journalists won’t have, familiarity with concepts that aren’t normally taught in journalism school … and story ideas that come from these different perspectives.” She and Mongrain see the program as part of the paper’s wider efforts to diversify its staff. Maybe the interns “will decide that journalism isn’t for them, but maybe someone will decide that rather than being an engineer, they’ll be a journalist.”
La Presse reporter Alice Girard-Bossé could have been a candidate for the internship herself. After studying cognitive neurosciences as an undergrad, she began to think graduate-level research wasn’t for her. She applied for, and got, a science journalism fellowship, which led to internships with La Presse and the magazine Québec Science. “It was a challenge, but I tried to read a lot and copy how my colleagues structured their sentences,” she said. At the end of her internships, La Presse kept her on as an on-call reporter covering “whatever came up – murders, fires, I was the one who covered it.” She now covers a wide range of subjects, but keeps coming back to science stories. “I think it’s a really important addition to the newsroom to have people who have studied in different fields to refer to when needed. I think we make a stronger team with diverse knowledge.” Her main piece of advice for aspiring journalists is to “ask lots of questions.”
Who chooses journalism in 2024?
Freelancing is often the first stop for people who take the plunge into journalism from another line of work. Architect Aurélia Crémoux worked at a Montreal architecture firm when she decided to take evening courses in the journalism certificate program at Université de Montréal and started doing some freelance reporting. Since January, she has left architecture altogether and has been freelancing full time.
“I’ve always been fascinated by journalism,” she said. “I suspected that I wasn’t going to earn the same salary as I would if I’d stayed in architecture.” But the timing worked for her, because she was laid off from her architect job just as Quartier Libre, the UdeM student magazine, was in need of freelancers. She gave it a go and hasn’t looked back yet. The work has brought her to unexpected places, including earning a grant to write a series of feature stories in Armenia. She’s also put her own skills to use, writing for architecture and heritage magazines.
“I work a lot – I have a decent salary, but I work a lot,” she said. “The only thing that worries me is thinking that I might not be able to keep up this rhythm over the long term.”
Radio-Canada reporter Patrick MacIntyre, who has a criminology degree, left his job in immigration with the federal government to pursue a journalism career. Although he acknowledges that leaving a “safe,” well-paying job was a risk that led him to rethink his finances, he says he was tired of it and wanted to do something more stimulating. “If I hadn’t tried journalism, I would have regretted it when I was older. If I can’t keep up, if I’m laid off or if for whatever reason it doesn’t work out, I can always do something else, but for the moment, it’s going well. I love learning something new every day. I don’t like it when each day is exactly the same.”
Mongrain said she hopes the program will introduce a new crop of young people to what she calls “one of the best jobs in the world.”
“We’re paid to learn things, meet people, ask questions. It’s a beautiful job, and it’s an essential job. One of the reasons we want more people to be interested is so that this beautiful job continues to exist. Who will be doing this in 20 years? That’s the question we’re trying to answer.”
Ruby Irene Pratka is a Montreal-based freelance writer, researcher and editor. Her work has been published in English and French in Vice Québec, Ricochet, Daily Xtra, Shareable and Canadaland, among other websites and magazines. She covers a wide range of topics but focuses on diversity and language policy. Originally from the U.S., she has been living the expat life since 2006. She has lived in eight countries and four provinces, but keeps coming back to the delights of Québec.