From the ‘Technique’ to the ‘Wall Street Journal’

When Cole Murphy posted his last film blog for his high school newspaper, he assumed it would be his final foray into media as he prepared to study business at Georgia Tech.    

The Alpharetta, Georgia, native never expected that, after graduating from the Institute, he would be moving to New York City to work for the Wall Street Journal as one of three recipients of the Joseph Rago Memorial Fellowship for Excellence in Journalism.  

Murphy was intent on pursuing business strategy and finance opportunities, completing internships at VIVA Finance, an Atlanta startup, and The Home Depot during his first two years at Tech. Looking for a creative outlet and a break from his coursework, he published an op-ed in the Technique, Georgia Tech's student-run newspaper, and rediscovered a desire to write.    

He became a regular in the paper's opinion section before becoming its entertainment editor and eventually the editor-in-chief after a summer internship in Washington, D.C. It was during his time in the nation's capital that Murphy says he was able to get a real-world education in journalism. He landed a job with The Dispatch as a reporter, and the pace of the industry is something that he wouldn't trade for anything.  

"I love the energy of a newsroom. It's amazing to be around writers I've read for a long time and to be able to bounce ideas off them. When a big story is developing, everyone is talking about the same thing and finding different ways to cover it. There is nothing like it," he said.  

Even as his career aspirations shifted, Murphy continued to dive deeper into the Scheller College of Business curriculum. With a strong interest in global politics and economics, his major gives him a unique outlook on current events and has shaped his reporting. Because Georgia Tech doesn't have a traditional journalism program, Murphy believes its student media benefits from having an "outsider perspective." 

"Not many people come here thinking they'll go into journalism, so it pulls in a group of students, like myself, who seek out an opportunity to reconnect with writing or find a new passion,” he said. “It brings an authenticity that other student papers may not have. There was no one to teach us what kinds of questions to ask when reporting for a piece, so we just asked whatever we thought people would be interested in.”  

Murphy walked across the stage at Commencement this spring and will begin his internship at the WSJ's opinion section in the fall after finishing his final courses this summer. The fellowship, which lasts nine months, is named in honor of Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer Joseph Rago, a member of the publication's editorial board who died in 2017 at the age of 34. To Murphy, journalism is "a craft as much as it is a job," but regardless of the subject matter, he wants readers to feel that anything he writes is guided by the principle of "telling the truth and backing it up with facts."