37 percent of people completely lost, Mark Morford

[Lydia Leftcoast]

59. Yup, they go to the "right" schools and know the "right" people

I spent my graduate school years at an Ivy League institution. Its newspaper was nothing special, just four pages of campus news, and yet an amazing number of staffers from it have turned up working for major newspapers, magazines, and TV programs. There's hardly a major publication out there that doesn't have somebody who worked for that university newspaper in the 1970s, and I'm sure there are later graduates writing for those publications, too, only I wouldn't recognize their names. I've seen bylines from names I recognize in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, the National Geographic, the PBS News Hour, NBC News, and CBS News.

By contrast, the University of Minnesota's paper, put out by students from its journalism school, was, at that time, a respectable newspaper. (It has gone downhill since then.) Twelve to twenty pages of campus and state news every day. Do those people turn up at major publications. Well, one of them has an on-and-off column for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The rest? Who knows?