Mike Greenberg (Medill ‘89) told students they should enjoy their time at college and worry less about what their future will look like after graduation.

Greenberg, alongside Elisabeth Bumiller (Medill ‘77), Younghee Lee (Medill ‘90) and Tina Rosenberg (Medill ‘82) spoke Thursday evening about their careers and the future of journalism during a panel discussion at the McCormick Foundation Center Forum. All four were inducted into the Medill Hall of Achievement at a ceremony held after the panel at the Chicago History Museum.

The inductees, which were announced last month, come from different areas of the journalism and media industry. Bumiller is the Washington bureau chief for The New York Times,
Greenberg is co-host of ESPN Radio’s talk show “Mike & Mike,” Lee is the executive vice president of global marketing for the mobile communications business unit at Samsung Electronics and Rosenberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, is a writer for The New York Times’ Fixes column.

Donal Henahan (Medill ‘48) and William H. Jones (Medill ‘65), both Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, were also inducted into the Hall of Achievement this year. Henahan and Jones passed away in 2012 and 1982, respectively.

During the panel, the alumni spoke about their favorite memories at Medill. Bumiller told the crowd about the first story she covered for The Daily and said she will always cherish seeing her name in print for the first time.

“There was my story, on the front page,” she said. “There was my name on it and I thought ‘Wow, that is really fun, that was great.’ I was totally hooked.”

Greenberg, whose show “Mike & Mike” is the nation’s most listened-to sports talk show, said students interested in sports journalism should always remember sports are about people.

“Covering sports now is really more like covering celebrities, sports figures have become so … culturally significant that we’re really covering stories about the people,” he said. “I would say sports are the ultimate reality television.”

When asked about the future of journalism, Rosenberg, who won a Pulitzer for general nonfiction writing, said it is a “weird” time to be a print journalist but that opportunities are still out there.

She said the traditional career path when she was a student was to get a job at a small paper after graduation and work your way up to national papers. Today, she said, freelancing changes everything.

“To me, the key to having a career that you love … is to think about being your own boss,” she said. “Don’t wait. Whatever you’re really passionate about and want to do journalism about and really care about, do it now.”

Lee, the only panelist who doesn’t work in the journalism world, said though she lacks an engineering degree and her job involves a lot of technology talk, she is still able to keep up with her colleagues and credits much of this to her training as a marketing expert at Medill.

“Every day is learning day,” she said. “To be a great marketeer, you have to … (know) how to be flexible and adapting and orienting different people to one direction is something really required for success.”

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