My First Byline: Jessica Karl
Columnist, Bloomberg Opinion
What is your current job?
I am a culture columnist and author of Bloomberg Opinion’s daily flagship newsletter, which I write Mondays-Thursdays. With the newsletter, my main task is to take all of the things our columnists write on any given day and weave it into a roundup that gives readers a sense of what we're thinking about. Since it arrives in people's inboxes at the end of the day, I aim to make it very approachable and digestible. I often pepper in moments of levity — memes, tweets, images, video clips — to support what I'm writing. Fun fact: I'm the first (and only) Bloomberg journalist in history to use "Timothée Chalamet" in a Terminal headline, which segues nicely into my other job here: culture columnist. Once or twice a month I'll write a standalone piece of commentary about something happening in the pop culture universe. It's a broad umbrella, so I've covered a bunch of different things, including review culture and Taylor Swift, legging legs and subway shirts, parents upset with Olivia Rodrigo, romantasy's BookTok boom and Broadway's gambit on Gen Z.
What was your first byline?
My first byline that I can recall was a column I wrote for my college newspaper, The Indiana Daily Student — go Hoosiers! — in 2014 about an app designed for cuddling, aptly called Cuddlr. I was paid $10 to write it, which I used to buy mac & cheese at Noodles and Company. Reading it back (kudos to the IDS for keeping meticulous records), it's pretty awful, save for the kicker: "Overall, the idea of touching strangers is weird. We don’t like brushing hands when we borrow a pencil from someone. Just imagine being their little spoon." I still stand by that!!
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What was your first real job in journalism?
My first "real" job was here at Bloomberg, believe it or not. I've been here for seven years at this point, and some colleagues joke that I emerged from the womb and waddled over to my desk. I started out as a social media editor for the opinion section in September of 2017, the year I graduated college. From as long as I can remember, opinion has appealed to me over news/reporting. Although I knew I was interested in journalism, I didn't go the traditional J-school route; I was an English major with a focus on creative writing. It was absurdly fun: I took poetry classes where we'd listen to Lorde in the woods and I got to flip through Silvia Plath's diaries with those fancy reading gloves. I loved every minute of it, but I did take electives on graphic design and media ethics to be practical. I don't think I would have gotten my first job without those skills I learned on the side.
Although some might not consider a social editor to be a "journalist" in the traditional sense, I'd still categorize it as such because social media is such an integral component of storytelling. Without it, most of the world would fail to connect with our words. I held the position until 2022 (when I began writing the newsletter), so I witnessed the platforms evolve a lot over that time span. Our team jumped at every new opportunity to experiment, launching an Instagram which now has over a million followers. To help shepherd something from the ground-up like that is super rewarding.
How did you get it?
Networking! Which sounds ... lame? But our media school would host these meet-and-greet career days and I always went to them just to see what kinds of things people were getting paid to do in the real world. When I heard from people with jobs that sounded interesting, I made an effort to look up their emails afterwards and send them a thank-you note. I didn't need a favor or anything at the time, which is why I think it worked well. I ended up getting an internship at CNN's opinion section the summer after I graduated with this strategy. And while I was at CNN, I got an email from Margaret Ely, the managing editor of social here at Bloomberg who I also met at a career day. She told me the opinion section was looking for a social editor and then connected me with the hiring manager. I remember it being a pretty robust hiring process, there were multiple rounds of interviews and an edit test I submitted 10 minutes late because I was panicked (do not do that!!!) and finally, I got the job. And I'm still here to this day.
What advice do you have for people looking to break into journalism?
There are two kinds of people in this world: People who don't know how to do something and throw in the towel and ask for help immediately, or people who figure it out themselves. Be the second person! Mastering a new skill or simply Googling the answer to something on your own doesn't mean you're not a team player. In fact, I'd say it's the opposite: It makes you efficient and valuable. I write a newsletter, but I also know how to edit TikTok videos, touch-up images and make charts. I was not born knowing how to do those things, but I think having a curiosity about the unknown is so important. That hunger to learn will help you grow, whether you're just starting out or if you've been doing this for a long time.
If that's too amorphous, I guess the other, more tangible advice I'd give is to do the networking and try out odd jobs. I think a lot of people see internships as some magical bridge to getting a job but it can also work the opposite way: You could spend three months working at a magazine and decide you *don't* want to work there ever again (this happened to me, actually: I interned at Nylon Magazine my junior year and realized the slower pace of print was not for me). Likewise with every job in life: You're interviewing the interviewer as much as they're interviewing you. Come armed with questions to figure out if it's the right fit.