The National is an unusual newspaper. Located in a country near the northeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, in a thriving city (Abu Dhabi) that attracts lots of expatriates. One that is written in English, a language that is native to only a fraction of the people who live here.

The paper attracts an eclectic collection of journalists. This is not a traditional newsroom of up-through-the-ranks grunts.

But, then, it strikes me that we have entered a new era of journalism, and the incoming wave of newbies are far more educated and worldly than their predecessors even 10 years ago.

Let’s look at some examples.

The National recently has hired four news reporters who boast the following credentials:

–Three have masters degrees, one from an Ivy League school, one in international relations..

–Between them, the four reporters can speak 10 languages. All can speak English, of course, but one or more of them also can speak Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, French and German. All of them speak at least a second language.

–One got an MA from one of the top journalism schools in America. One has two masters from two schools. And then there is the Ivy Leaguer who has a BA in the “philosophy of religion.”

–One was an intern at CNN. One did an internship with the AP and a daily newspaper. A third had three internships — with the BBC, Newsweek and ABC.

–One went to high school in a French-speaking country. Another went to high school in the U.S. Midwest but attended what is probably the leading university in the UAE and is sure to understand the UAE and the region.

Anyway, these four have credentials and language skills and (it would seem) international life experience unheard of in American journalism a generation ago.

When I was hired, and for the 20-30 years following, the mass of U.S. newspapers hired kids with BAs in journalism. Period.  Often from a school located within an hour’s drive of the newspaper.

A few ambitious newspapers might try to get kids from some of the leading J schools (Missouri, Kansas, Northwestern) … but those people showed up at work only marginally better prepared to go to work. They might know AP style, they might need less editing, they probably were a little more polished. Five years later, though, the scribes from San Diego State or SUNY-Binghamton might be better than any of them.

In fact, most of us entering the field were middle- or working-class kids who went to schools known for putting graduates into jobs in the region. If a few of those graduates had been to Europe or the stray candidate could speak Spanish … well, that was a special added bonus, but not necessarily germane to covering city hall or high school football.

Overwhelmingly, entry-level journalists (and you could include most of the Brits in here, too) had BAs from state schools, were effectively monolingual and had marginal personal exposure to the outside world. (They did, however, almost always have significant real-life journalism experience at college newspapers.)

In that era, any journalist who bothered to get a masters degree was usually viewed as a sort of “failure to launch” candidate or a dilettante. Someone who had “wasted” two years (and spent a lot of money) studying journalism esoterica when they should have been practicing the real thing at a real newspaper.

As recently as a decade ago, I would tell young journalists that they did not need a masters to succeed in the field. Soon after, I might have added “it would be nice” … but the key, I always said, was to get into a newsroom and get busy. Always.

Clearly, things have changed. The hometown BA just doesn’t cut it anymore.

The incoming quartet of people at The National may be a bit more polished and worldly and academically advanced than those at other English-language newspapers around the world … but I bet they are still in the mainstream of “new journos” in our globalizing world.

The sense I have is that employers in the news business now have so many candidates from which to choose that they can expect advanced degrees, exotic specialties, multiple languages and a passport with lots and lots of stamps in it.

How do I feel about this?

Well, for one, I no longer scoff when kids (mine, for example) say they need to get a masters. Clearly, you probably do.

Second, it brings home the degree to which journalism is a buyer’s market.  It always was. I mean, it has always beaten “working for a living” and had more candidates than positions. But now? Would-be journos must outnumber available jobs by a factor of … oh, throw out a ratio. Ten to one? Fifty to one?

It now seems unwise and smacks of incomplete preparation to throw your monolingual, never-left-the-country BA from a local state school out there … and expect to get hired at a newspaper.

My first impression is … this is good. We need more worldly people in the news business. But my second thought is … “thank goodness it wasn’t like this when I got a job straight out of a California state school with nothing more than a BA” …

And my third?

That journalism is about to become a more elitist field than it was before. A century ago, it was a profession filled with regular folks. It morphed into a field with college graduates, and it began to lose its man-on-the-street grittiness. But now, newsrooms increasingly are filled with people who have the credentials to be a foreign officer for their native country. And those are not Regular Folks. They have been places and seen and done things that separate them from the masses of humanity.

The trick, as we go forward, will be getting these superbly prepared newcomers to hang on to (or develop) a sense of empathy for those who don’t have their educations and experience. I have no doubt today’s rookies will be better at understanding global issues than we were, two or three decades ago. But will they have any connection to the man walking on the street outside their newspaper? We shall see.

But, yeah, if you want to have a journalism career, get the masters, do all the internships (yes, more than one) you can wrangle, do a stint in the Peace Corps, work for an NGO … because the old,  parochial system is so over.