On Monday, Buffalo News reporter Charity Vogel spoke to English majors about their prospective careers and how to utilize a liberal arts degree.
Vogel has been at The Buffalo News for 14 years, working as a feature writer, book critic and Monday columnist. Vogel herself was an English major at Canisius College, where she completed her undergraduate work. She has been able to carry what she learned as an English major into a successful career as a writer. She offered her experiences and advice to some of UB's aspiring journalists.
Vogel said the "current state" of the newspaper industry forces students to understand the "tricks and strategies" for getting into the field as soon as possible.
"I thought by sharing my own experiences it might help some of the undergraduates here figure out what they can do with an English major," Vogel said. "And how they can use that as a pathway into journalism."
Vogel got her first taste of journalism at The Griffin, Canisius College's student newspaper. At 18, she became a "stringer," freelancing for The Buffalo News, and she was later able to get an internship at The News her senior year of college.
She credits her English degree with helping her perceive the broader context and emotions inherent in the situations she has been placed in as a reporter.
In 2001, she was sent to New York City and stood at the base of the World Trade Center 24 hours after the towers fell. It was her experience as an English major that helped her capture and understand the context appropriate to report on that kind of tragedy.
She uses her past as an English major to be able to pick out themes and motivations that unify stories, much like what is done within class discussions of novels within typical college English classes.
Vogel encourages English majors to "take courses...that give them the broadest possible understanding of how people work and how the world works."
"Working on an English major gives you a real insight into people and events," Vogel said.
Journalism also works as a great pathway into other careers like public relations or teaching. Vogel is also currently working on a book, tentatively titled The Angola Horror, about a train wreck that happened in 1867 in Angola, N.Y. The book is likely to get published next year by Cornell University Press, Vogel said.
Vogel thinks a student's experience in college allows him or her the opportunity to soak up an individual sense of ethics and morals; something he or she taps into daily as a journalist. She advised every student to be the "writer you want to be" and to "make sure by-line means as much today as it will when you're 40."
Vogel says many of the journalists she works with haven't gone to journalism schools and have liberal arts backgrounds.
"Even though I have been doing book reviews and book criticism for all the years I have been at the paper, the writers who are my favorite writers are still the ones I read in English classes," Vogel said. "I'm very much an English major at heart, and all those years in a newsroom - I find you draw on that all the time."
Vogel's father is Mike Vogel, who worked at The News from 1970 to 2011 and started as the paper's editorial page editor in 1998, and her grandfather was a typesetter at the newspaper. Both Charity and Mike Vogel have taught as adjunct instructors at UB.
Email: news@ubspectrum.com
Photo: Breadchastick / Wikimedia Commons
