CEJ/MAMJ Newsletter Issue 3, June 2026

When It Gets Intense: Time Management in J-School

Graduate school can be a big adjustment, especially for people who have been out of academia for a few years, and journalism school (J-school) can be even tougher given the often compressed timeline of many programs that finish in a year or, in MAMJ’s case, 14 months. Combined with work and family commitments, and life just happening, not getting overwhelmed in an intense program is very important, and a key skill to master is time management.

How one utilizes their time short of the ability of being able to increase the number of hours in a day (or greatly reduce the need for sleep) is key. Here are some strategies and tips on how to (re)organize your time to get everything done.

Weekends Are For Working: You can let off the gas a little on weekends, as everyone needs some down time to recharge themselves. However, set aside the “I’m just going to relax all weekend” mindset until after you graduate. Weekends may be the only days you have to do extended, in-depth reading or online research, or to have enough quiet time to focus on your assignments. They can also be good times to plan out the coming week so you can hit the new week with a sensible plan on getting what you need done.

Lunchtimes Are For Interviews: If you are working full-time, it may seem nearly impossible to be able to get interviews with other professionals during normal working hours. You may need to sacrifice a lunch out and just grab a quick bite in order to have the time to do some interviews for the stories you’re working on. This is where the “week ahead” planning mentioned above can come into play.

Get Used to Multitasking: Depending on the type of J-school program, you may be working on several different stories simultaneously (just like a professional journalist), so you should not set everything aside to only focus on finishing one story. Get used to doing things in starts and stops–writing one story, only to get interrupted by a source calling you back and doing an interview for another story that isn’t due for a couple days, then gathering some facts for another story that is half-done. And so on.

Sacrifice The Social Life–To An Extent: If, like the MAMJ students, your courses are in the evenings and you work during the day, then it leaves little to no time for the kind of social life you may have enjoyed before J-school. You may need to explain clearly to family and friends that during the time you’re in the program you simply won’t be available for a sudden dinner or movie night. Of course life events happen–don’t skip weddings (or funerals) or other important life events–but keep in mind policies on excused absences and be judicious in reaching your limit for absences. And remember, a fun bachelorette party weekend is a weekend that you are also not getting J-school work done (as with the first point).

Plan Ahead Realistically: As you get your syllabi and see the scope and nature of your assignments, you can start to plan out how long it will take you to complete certain types of assignments. Always keep in mind, especially with story assignments, that interview subjects usually don’t care about your deadlines and will likely take longer to contact and interview than you think they should. Also be realistic in your own abilities and energy level–are you really going to read three chapters and complete a 1,000-word article after you get home at 10 p.m. from a long day of work and class?

The Importance of Good Photos with Stories

Long gone are the days when a reporter would be sent out with a photographer to cover a story. It still may happen occasionally, especially for big stories, but for the most part it is expected that reporters will be taking their own photos for their stories (and video for multimedia journalists). 

It has surprised me over the years at how bad student journalists have been at taking photos, especially given the visually dominant social media most of them have grown up with. When they take some photos–often they don’t–the photos typically show the backs of peoples’ heads in the rows in front of them, with a long shot that tries to capture the crowd, the sign or poster of the conference, the grandeur of the venue, and the tiny, tiny speakers on stage in a panel discussion. When I ask why they took the photo from so far away, the typical answer is that they didn’t want to be in the way and bother people.

The other explanation that usually arises after more questioning is that they are trying to capture everything about the event in one photo–and as a result they don’t get anything. A long-distance shot with no focal point and poor composition is almost as bad as not having any photo at all to accompany a story online–even the dreaded “execution at dawn” photos of people lined up holding their awards is better than that.

I tell students to not worry about bothering people at events when shooting–as long as they are not walking around on stage or using a blinding flash in a darkened hall, people tacitly understand that the photographer’s job is to get some good shots for the story. Closer shots are more engaging than distant shots, even if not all participants show up in the shot. That’s what cutlines are for, where more can be explained (including the name of the person in the shot) than maybe what is shown in the photo.

Vertical versus horizontal is another question that typically comes up. The conventional wisdom, in general, is that it is better to hold your phone horizontally when shooting photos or video, as that is the aspect ratio that we typically see when viewing something on a screen. However, if you know you will only ever post the video or photo on social media (and how do you know that?), then you can get away with holding the phone vertically. Even so, it’s easier to cut the frame to fit a vertical frame, whereas you can’t stretch a vertical frame to fit neatly into a horizontal screen.

For online news sites having photos with a story makes the difference between a blank gray box above the headline on the homepage and a visually appealing shot that helps draw viewers into the story. For freelancers, having photos to accompany your story pitches may be the difference between selling a story to a publication or not, plus usually adds to what you earn. For the long-term, having an archive of photos you’ve taken, especially of newsworthy or events that turn out to be of historical importance, can give you a bit of income by licensing your photos to agencies, news outlets, or other organizations that may want to use them.

The Brief: What We Accomplished–And What We Plan to Do

The first cohort accomplished a lot during their 11 months of courses. In their Introduction to Digital Tools course last summer they brainstormed the name and eventually the logo for what would become The Brief, the independent student news website where they publish some of their stories. In the fall semester they focused on issues of information architecture, UI/UX design, what content management system they would use, and created from scratch vision and mission statements, editorial guidelines, and ethics guidelines.

In the spring semester they began an editorial and production workflow process in Newsroom Practice 2, working through remaining issues around style consistency, photo cutlines, creating a professional visual style guide, and taking some steps toward promoting the site and their work in social media as well as creating a strategic business plan for long-term sustainability of the site. Some of the students have already been able to use their stories published in The Brief as calling cards to other media outlets, successfully pitching articles and getting published elsewhere.

There is still plenty to do, and the second cohort will be picking up the torch and further improving The Brief. Not only will they be publishing stories from their summer and fall courses, but we plan to launch multimedia elements to the site, including podcasts, videos, and in the fall a regular short newscast. The added content will further showcase student work, and will help make The Brief one of the relevant media players in Armenia’s media and journalism landscape.

Even further down the road–we would love to make The Brief where innovative and engaging journalism is done through interactive multimedia, and where what we try could be useful blueprints for other media outlets in Armenia and abroad to also do.