Journalist Malcolm Gladwell: "Stop going to journalism programs"

Author/journalist Malcolm Galdwell ("Tipping Point," "Blink," "Outliers")gave this advice to young journalists in a 2009 Time interview:

The issue is not writing. It's what you write about. One of my favorite columnists is Jonathan Weil, who writes for Bloomberg. He broke the Enron story, and he broke it because he's one of the very few mainstream journalists in America who really knows how to read a balance sheet. That means Jonathan Weil will always have a job, and will always be read, and will always have something interesting to say. He's unique. Most accountants don't write articles, and most journalists don't know anything about accounting. Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today, I would go get a master's in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that's the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.

In a 2011 Nation piece, Michael Tracey wrote: "...if you take a full major’s worth of journalism classes, that’s about twelve (or however many) less classes in the humanities that could’ve equipped you with an intellectual framework from which to approach your work."