Columbia University has suspended its environmental journalism program. Not because the world needs fewer journalists who are schooled in environmental sciences. Actually, the world needs more of those, lots more. But because jobs aren’t available for them in the suffering journalism industry. The professors who ran the program said in a joint letter, “Although our students are assuming huge debt for knowledge and skills that we think are valuable, we do not feel comfortable exhorting young people to take on that burden when their chances of repaying it have so diminished.” This is not good news.
Author: Peter Maass
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.
View all posts by Peter Maass
