Mass Communication Professional Tracks
SIUE offers the following three professional areas of study for undergraduate Mass Communications students:
Journalism
Students earning degrees in our Journalism Professional Option find careers as reporters, editors, sportswriters or photojournalists on weekly or daily newspapers and broadcasting stations. They also may land their first jobs with news wire services, organizational and professional newsletters, national, regional and local magazines, trade periodicals and print and broadcast online news sites.
Among the many jobs held by our department's print journalism graduates are positions on newspapers such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Alton Telegraph, the Edwardsville Intelligencer, the Kansas City Star, the Belleville News-Democrat, the Fort Lauderdale News-Sun-Sentinel, and the Oakland Press (Calif). Among positions held by SIUE's electronic journalism graduates are Vice President for Hard News and Special Projects at CBS, an ESPN baseball announcer, a sports producer at KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, a general manager at WKBD-TV in San Francisco. SIUE grads literally and figuratively cover the entire St. Louis market and some have won multiple Emmys.
Advertising & Strategic Media
Our graduates work for ad agencies, for the marketing departments of major corporations, for the sales departments of media organizations and in many other ancillary jobs in the marketing mix. In ad agencies, our graduates are very successful on the creative side as well as excelling as account executives, media specialists and buyers.
Among the many kinds of jobs held by our graduates are Manager of Marketing Communications for the Anheuser-Busch Companies, sales executive for AT&T in St. Louis, Vice President of Fleishman-Hillard Public Relations in St. Louis, Vice President of Martin Williams Advertising in Minneapolis, President of DM&A Advertising and Marketing in St. Louis, President of Kochan and Company Advertising in St. Louis, General Manager of WQAD-TV in Moline, IL, Vice President of Turec Advertising in St. Louis and Executive Vice President of KETC-TV-9 in St. Louis.
Media Production
Recent graduates report that there are many more jobs "out there" than they imagined when they first enrolled at SIUE. Besides finding employment at television and radio stations, our graduates are writing and producing videos for public relations agencies and P.R. clients, working in industrial and corporate communications, serving the video needs of hospitals, schools, colleges and law offices, designing and producing interactive video and audio for world wide web sites. As well, broadcasting graduates have moved into the business of marketing and marketing audio and video equipment, and yes, many graduates still find jobs in radio, BROADCAST and cable television, news production, sales, traffic, operations, and in other departments. The new kind of broadcasting graduate our department produces is a valuable commodity throughout the MassComm job market.
Our grads include the president of one of the largest St. Louis tv/film production companies, a Hollywood screenwriter/producer, an ESPN baseball announcer, producer-directors, reporters, anchors and news managers at every television station in St. Louis, not to mention our grads in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and elsewhere. There's a director of production at Westwood One Radio Network, head of medical video for a major hospital and a senior digital video animator for a large post production house. Our graduates work in either the production, news, promotion, sales and management departments of every television station in St. Louis.
