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Journalism Isn’t for Everybody

My MA in Journalism showed me the job has hidden requirements.

Taru Anniina Liikanen
5 min readOct 13, 2021
Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash

After finishing college, I went straight back to school to get an MA in Journalism. The experience helped me polish my written Spanish to get it to a professional level, and taught me a lot about writing. I also got great insight into what the profession was really like.

My MA program was taught partially at the offices of an important Argentinian newspaper. It ended with a two-month summer internship, which basically meant we had a shot at working in the paper, and some of us would even go on to become employees. The catch? We had to pay for our tuition, even in those months when we were working for the company.

Just as we were finishing the school year and heading to the internship, I got another offer for a paying job in political communication. Thanks to what I’d seen during classes and when working with my teachers, deciding to not work in journalism was a no-brainer.

Here are some of the things I learned.

1. Journalism is incredibly competitive but doesn’t pay

Some of the people in my class were always looking for an opportunity to hate on other people’s work and would not have hesitated one second to rip a classmate’s…

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Taru Anniina Liikanen
Taru Anniina Liikanen

Written by Taru Anniina Liikanen

Stand-up comedian and recovering political ghostwriter. Finnish by birth, porteña at heart. Bad jokes frequent.

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