Harvard Crimson Journalism Summit: A Review

“Journalism is a dying field.” If you’re like me and interested in professional journalism, you’ve probably heard this sentiment countless times. And it often feels daunting—it’s easy to look at the current role of journalism and see it condensed into only reactionary retweeted headlines while long-form pieces, television, radio, and print media are left to rot. But at the Harvard Crimson Journalism Summit (CJS), hundreds of high school students, college journalists, and professionals come together to look forward.

Six Rambler journalists, including myself, were able to attend CJS this year on the Harvard campus with Bush’s support. I’ll start my review with a heavy disclaimer: if you are not interested in collegiate or professional journalism, this Summit will not interest you. The format is dominated by panels and presentations, with ample time to pose questions to experienced, specialized journalists. In other words, it’s essentially two days of long, detailed journalism class that I found engaging, useful, and inspiring. If this doesn’t sound like you, I wouldn’t recommend it.

The seminars we attended, run by current Harvard student journalists, explored elements of the Harvard Crimson, the university newspaper. These seminars covered a wide range of topics, including multimedia, professionalism, magazines, sports coverage, and opinion pieces. The variety of topics is valuable, especially in both potential careers and application to the very newspaper you’re reading now, The Rambler.

Hold on…should I even refer to The Rambler as a newspaper? The short answer is no. Newspapers and magazines are overlapping but not interchangeable terms. Both formats can have high-quality reporting and be the first to release groundbreaking information. But newspapers generally put out straightforward, concise articles, while magazines release less frequently, but with longer, more analytical pieces—think The New York Times versus The New Yorker.

Bush just isn’t big enough to have an actual newspaper. And I don’t think it needs one, either. As editor-in-chief, my ultimate goal is to publish quality student work and have the school community read it, resulting in a more fun, varied style, which I love. But this does make CJS’s contents more applicable to professional journalism rather than changing how we run The Rambler. For the near future, we’re not going to enforce a structure or only stick to neutral, factual tones. The Crimson edits on a strict style guide, including specific placements for article elements, even enforcing individual sentence structure. 

However, one of the final seminars focused on The Crimson’s magazine and blog. The first was impressive, featuring long-form pieces—exceptionally, a recent piece exposing the New England Primate Research Center through resources in the Harvard Archives. After several presentations on the more factual, rigid side of The Crimson, I was worried that the college newspaper life might not be for me. But the magazine’s work made me even more excited than before, knowing that longer-form, narrative, creatively-structured articles remain an option in college.

The panels of professional journalists were mixed into the curriculum, providing a variety of perspectives from outlets like The New York Times, NBC, Wall Street Journal, and many more. Compared to the seminars, these panels focused on careers, professional experience, and the future of journalism. The information across several hours is too much to condense into one article, so here are some of my favorite topics touched on:

Journalism is rapidly changing. Many of the professionals described how Twitter and other short-form content have now become intertwined with their work. However, all of these changes are so recent. The field of journalism has adapted to the times like no other throughout the last few decades—it is not dying, it is changing, and we don’t know what it will look like in 5, 10, 20 years.

Find where you can stand out. College GPA and major don’t matter nearly as much for journalism as they do for other careers. However, your college newspaper work is a major hiring factor. Write a lot, and play to your strengths. A common fallacy, one of the panelists described, is “you know yourself better than anyone.” Often, you don’t. You might be an excellent finance writer rather than an artist, or vice versa.

You have a digital footprint. If you succeed, you become a target. Just something to keep in mind. As I wrote this, I googled myself to double-check—right now, I have a chess tournament from when I was 6, and a couple of art reviews… I’ll try to keep clean.

Write accessibly. Especially when writing about government and other layered topics, you want the average person to understand the core event—otherwise, you’re not effectively informing.

But CJS is not perfect. A drawback was that we heard from college journalists and professionals who began in the ‘80s, but not in-between. It was hard to know what a 5-year post-graduation position would be like now. Some of the professionals also started unconventionally, being directly recruited due to their location and abilities. 

The most distasteful part of CJS was an independent college counselor speaking about the college application process. At that moment, I was taken out of the inspiring journalistic dialogue and was reminded I was at Harvard, and a major pull of the program is the Harvard name. As a senior, committed to college, who wasn’t doing this program for the certificate, the inclusion of this speaker felt as if The Crimson knew people were just doing it for the certificate, and for their college applications. Even if that’s the case for others, it rendered the whole environment disingenuous for a moment—although that wasn’t nearly the case overall.

In conclusion, I would recommend CJS for aspiring college journalists. However, I think the virtual alternative option would work just as well for students. Thank you to The Crimson, Bush, and my fellow attendees for making this happen!