How to Get Your First Byline
This is the first installment of a longer look at how to break into journalism, available for paid subscribers only. If you can’t afford a subscription, email yourfirstbyline@gmail.com for a free one-month subscription or sign up below for a free one-week trial.
Steven Padilla was in sixth grade when he got his first byline. He and his friend Ronnie started playing with his mom’s typewriter, taking turns writing jokes about their school. But they soon decided the material was too good to keep to themselves. They retyped it to look like a newspaper, calling it The 203 News after their room number, and left an unsigned copy on Miss Sherman’s desk before class the next day.
"Who did this?" she asked, looking around. The two boys said nothing. She started to read silently and began to laugh. "What is it?" a kid asked. It was, she said, a newspaper. The class demanded that she read it.
“She started reading and that's when the a-ha moment happened,” Padilla recalled, decades later. “Kids began to laugh. At our words! Using only words — our ideas — Ronnie and I were able to move people. I know this sounds corny, but that's when I knew I somehow would do this with my life. We eventually confessed. Miss Sherman, bless her, encouraged us to keep writing The 203 News, so we did—with bylines.”
These days, Padilla helps other people get their bylines as an editor for the Los Angeles Times. But like most journalists, he still remembers that first byline — his own name, beneath a real news story.
Not everyone gets their first byline in the sixth grade. Travel writer Jen Rose Smith was working as a pastry chef when she wrote her first article, a feature story on local apple brandy distilling, for Vermont Magazine. Political reporter Byron Tau was working as a bartender at a Cheesecake Factory when he landed a job as a newsroom assistant at Politico. And Francine McKenna spent 20 years as a public accountant before turning her skills to investigative reporting on accounting, auditing and corporate governance.
But while their stories are all different, there are some similarities in how they broke into the industry. It’s typically a mixture of doggedness, skill, expertise and plain old luck. For aspiring journalists, it can be maddeningly difficult to figure out how to land a job, especially at a time when the industry is in so much flux. But even longtime journalists aren’t always clear on how the process works. After asking nearly 100 reporters how they got their first byline, I’m still surprised on a regular basis at some of their backstories.
If you’re reading this, you may be wondering how to get your own first byline. Or maybe have already gotten your first byline, and now you want to know how to get them more regularly, whether that’s as a freelancer, a staff writer or the founder of your own news outlet. Or you might be already working as a journalist but want to know more about how the industry works. Whichever is the case, this is for you.
I’m going to spell out what you need to get a job in journalism and go over step-by-step how you can go about getting those things. Some of the advice may seem obvious to you, but it may not be to someone else. Some of the advice may seem counterintuitive. And some of it may be contradictory. Not every journalist agrees on whether you should ever take an unpaid internship or otherwise write for free. Where everyone agrees, I’ll share that advice. And when there are disagreements, I’ll spell out the arguments on both sides so you can make an informed decision.
Stick with me and you should be well on your way to your first byline.
Nothing captures the soul of a news outlet like its newsroom. Some are ritzy, with large fish tanks and walls of televisions. Others have all the glamour of the conference room at a Ramada Inn by the airport. Some are bustling hives of activity, with editors shouting over low-slung cubicle walls when news breaks. But there are also newsrooms blanketed by a monastic silence, with heavy wooden doors to private offices that close when the phone rings.
While newsrooms vary, the hiring process for filling them is fairly similar. If you want to get an entry-level position as a journalist, it helps to understand how this process works, to ensure that you can get your foot in the door and land the job you want.