My First Byline: Ali Breland
My First Byline: Ali Breland
Staff writer, The Atlantic
What is your current job?
I am a staff writer at The Atlantic covering tech, politics, and the internet.
What was your first byline?
My first byline was like an album review or something for my college paper at UT Austin, The Daily Texan.
Professionally, my first byline that was really important to me was a freelance story I did for Logic(s) Magazine. The editor, Ben Tarnoff, helped get it republished in The Guardian. I was on staff at The Hill and had some other freelance bylines and bylines from internships and jobs at NPR and Politico, but this was the first one that was a feature I did that had my voice and analysis in it, and gave me more confidence that I could do more enterprisey features.
What was your first real job in journalism?
My first real job in journalism was as a web producer at Politico. I was a part of a team that every article on the site went through. Our job was to take the story text, put it in the content management system, add a photo to it, add links to related stories, etc. and then publish it. We had to do this as fast as possible. We also took turns managing all of Politico's social media accounts. Occasionally, we'd get to write breaking news stories late at night (my shift was 2 p.m.-10 p.m.) and or on the weekends (I worked Saturdays).
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How did you get it?
The shortest version of the story is that I was interning at NPR in Washington just after college, and made friends with a mutual friend from Texas who was leaving her job as a web producer at Politico and suggested my name to be her potential replacement.
The longer version is that in college, in addition to writing for the paper, I freelanced and got opinion bylines on CNN.com and in the Christian Science Monitor (through cold pitching). I think that this helped me both get the internship at NPR (which also helped make me more competitive at Politico) and also helped my case for working at Politico.
In college, I also took a semester off to work as a harvest intern helping make wine in California (this sounds romantic, but the job consisted entirely of doing manual labor for 8-12 hours a day, often six days a week) and studying abroad in Istanbul. My primary reason for doing these things was because I was interested in them, but my second-order rationale was that they would make me look more interesting in the job market. I think this worked, because my interview for the web producer job mostly consisted of the hiring manager asking me about working at the winery and my time abroad at Bogazici University in Istanbul, where he had also happened to go on a band trip when he was in college.
I think that having a record of being able to do journalism beyond just my college paper, and then seeming vaguely intrepid on top of that helped differentiate my application.
What advice do you have for people looking to break into journalism?
Because journalism is a competitive industry with winnowing jobs, I think that you have to push yourself and try to be strategic. You kind of have to do stuff that other people don't want to. Stuff that might be uncomfortable and taxing. That means trying to freelance, even if you already have a job (In addition to opeds in college, I've freelanced on top of every staff job I've had) or already work at your school's paper. That means trying to come up with unique story ideas. It can mean applying for an early career reporting fellowship you think you won't get. It also means trying to meet or talk to working journalists about their experiences, getting a master's (not necessarily in journalism) or even a Ph.D. (ideally, only if it's funded. don't incur extra debt if you can help it) to build subject matter expertise, or even just ripping through a bunch of episodes of the Longform podcast, studying the careers of journalists and writers you admire, reading their stories and books, reading this newsletter, reading other media newsletters etc. There's not one path towards any kind of job, and you'll have to improvise with whatever situation you end up in, but if you look at these things you can start to understand the rough groves of how you might try to eventually end up in certain kinds of jobs.
Being prepared to move abroad is also potentially useful. Staff jobs are difficult to find, especially when you're starting out, and freelancing can be financially difficult. Freelancing and/or working at an English language daily, or a stringer in a country with a lower cost of living can be a useful way to offset financial strain, and give you access to other kinds of stories that American journalists may be missing. If I were starting out now and didn't get any promising entry-level jobs or internships, this is probably what I would do, knowing what I know now.