Two Chicago Sun-Times reporters told a group of about 50 students and faculty that experience is needed to land a job with a large paper.

Mark Brown and Tom McNamee agreed at Thursday’s lecture in the Capitol room of the Holmes Student Center that working for their college paper helped them gain the experience they needed to obtain jobs after they graduated.

Brown said, “By the time you get out of school, you have to have something to show somebody if you want a job.”

Brown said getting a job is a building situation. You have to work for your college paper. It also helps to write and sell stories to other publications, he said.

When asked about advice he would give for a graduating journalism major, McNamee said, “The best thing you can do after college is get the best job you can and keep writing.” He also suggested joining a daily newspaper instead of a weekly. Also, mobility might have an effect on one’s job market, he said.

Brown said, “I have seen it work well for other people to go on and do other things after graduation, but for me it (going to graduate school) worked out well.

“I don’t believe that the master’s degree helped me as much as my experience with working for the Sun-Times as an intern.

“If a student only has a journalism degree coming out of college, he has no chance of getting a job on any medium to large size newspaper in Chicago or other major cities in Illinois,” Brown said.

Being on the Sun-Times staff for six years, Brown and McNamee have seen many changes in the way the paper has operated. “About a year after I started working there, Ruppert Murdoch bought out the paper and that was a change for the worse,” McNamee said.

McNamee said Murdoch changed the graphics, the headline size on the front page, the news departments and many of the news topics. He said Murdoch made these changes to “grab the readers’ attention.”

The current owner, Robert Page, bought the Sun-Times in 1986. There was immediate improvement in the paper, McNamee said.

“He worked for a more serious and purposeful paper. I believe that newspapers can’t sacrifice intelligent writing for trying to be not boring,” McNamee said.

Brown said after he graduated from NIU in May of 1977, he worked as an intern for the Suburban Tribune, a supplement of the Chicago Tribune. After his internship, Brown said he attended Sangamon State University for their one year Public Affairs Reporting master’s degree.

Brown worked for the Sun-Times for six months as an intern with the SSU program and then moved to work in Des Moines for the Quad-City Times, he said. After four years at the Quad-City Times, Brown returned to the Sun-Times as a full-time general assignment reporter, he said.

McNamee said after he graduated from NIU in 1976, he also went to work for the Suburban Tribune.

He went to the University of Chicago for his master’s degree of sciences from the school of social service administration and then began his work for the Sun-Times, he said.