New Beginnings: Jillian Kay Melchior, ’09, Heads to London with The Wall Street Journal
Written by Stephanie Gordon
Jillian Kay Melchior, ’09, a politics major, has worked her way to the top, so to speak. With a gentle nudge from her grandfather to consider a career in journalism, Jillian now reports for The Wall Street Journal. With hard work, persistence, and dedication, Jillian has made her mark in the journalism world.
Jillian said she remembers her grandfather suggesting a career in journalism because she liked writing and considered herself an assertive and curious person. “I realized in high school there’s a reason to be asking tough questions,” Jillian said. “It was an epiphany that you can do that for a living.”
Hailing from Cheyenne, Wyoming, her path to Hillsdale College wasn’t traditional. After high school, she spent two years studying journalism at Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne, which is regularly recognized for its strong journalism program. “It was exactly what I needed for those two years,” she said. “I transferred to Hillsdale because I wanted to learn not just how to practice the craft of journalism, but also to study the theoretical and abstract side of politics and economics. I wanted to delve into ideas and learn how to think about them.”
The summer between community college and coming to Hillsdale, Jillian had won the Scripps-Howard Roy Howard Student Reporting Contest and went to Japan and South Korea to get hands-on newsroom experience. That time in Asia opened her eyes to foreign correspondence. “I remember being in South Korea and going up to the demilitarized zone, where you can look over into North Korea,” said Jillian. “Standing there and seeing a place that’s not free put into contrast really starkly that politics matters.”
When I asked Jillian what it takes to separate yourself from a pool of journalists, she simply said: “Get up in the morning and read The Wall Street Journal.” She said she doesn’t speak as someone who’s self-interested. “It does a really good job of covering the world, telling you what you need to know, and the opinion page in particular is just wonderful.”
And that’s just some of the advice Jillian would give a young journalist, especially a young student journalist. She also recommended calling up anyone in the journalism world and asking for advice. “You would be amazed at how generous people are with their time,” she said. “Their advice can easily lead to jobs. Everybody wants to help a student, so take advantage. It’s going to be a lot harder to get in the door at a major publication if you’re just another college grad. So build that relationship, write a handwritten thank-you note, and keep in touch.”
Jillian once walked in the young student journalist shoes. As a junior at Hillsdale, she spent weeks reporting on a sect of fundamentalist Protestants who practiced arranged marriage.
“I had actually stumbled on this story while at LCCC in Wyoming,” said Jillian. “A fellow student’s parents tried to coerce her into an arranged marriage. As I started reporting on it, I realized that proponents of this practice actually had a fairly complex belief system about marriage. The Wall Street Journal has a column called ‘Houses of Worship’ on faith issues, and this seemed like a good fit for it. So when Naomi Schaefer Riley of the WSJ came to speak on campus, I pitched her the idea, and she was kind enough to accept it.” On April 8, 2008, Jillian’s piece was published in the WSJ. She described that day as “very exciting.”
Jillian said her most influential class at Hillsdale was “definitely Dr. Morrisey’s World Politics class.” She fondly remembers studying the 1979 revolution in Iran. “I was working on a piece this morning that involves Iran, and having that history in context is enormously valuable.”
The summer before Jillian graduated from Hillsdale, she interned at The Detroit News and covered the Republican and Democratic political conventions, where she met journalist James Taranto, her lifelong mentor. Taranto encouraged Jilliam to apply for the Bartley Fellowship with the WSJ, and she got it. “Because I had some Asia experience, they sent me right out of college to Hong Kong. I got to cover how Beijing was rigging the election in Macau.”
When Jillian completed the fellowship, there wasn’t a job opening at the WSJ. In 2012, she went to China on a Robert Novak fellowship to cover religious persecution and the underground church. Bill McGurn, another member of the WSJ Editorial Board, advised her project, and much of her reporting was published by the WSJ. In 2017, Jillian was hired as writer for the Opinion page and has been with the WSJ ever since.
“I think one of the things I really like about journalism is that there isn’t a normal day,” Jillian said. “If I’m not traveling, I wake up and read The Wall Street Journal first, and a ton of other publications. Because I’ve done more foreign correspondence over the years, oftentimes I’ll wake up really early and have conversations with sources who are in different time zones. So sometimes mornings can start out really intense. It just depends on what the deadline is and what the story is.”
Jillian’s “normal” day is about to change at the start of 2023. She and her husband, Taylor Collins, are leaving New York City for London because Jillian recently accepted a position with the WSJ’s London bureau. She will be covering Europe as a member of the WSJ Editorial Board.
“I’m most looking forward to exploring a new city and continent, and of course doing some reporting,” Jillian said. “I’m also looking forward to doing much more coverage of the war in Ukraine and its implications for Europe.”
Jillian concluded our conversation by saying the most fulfilling thing she’s done in her career is reporting on the democracy movement in Hong Kong and the war in Ukraine. “It’s one thing to have all these political values of human rights and freedoms, but it’s another thing to get to know people that are taking enormous risks to fight for those things. Telling their stories and getting to know them has been my absolute favorite thing I’ve ever done; it’s been really meaningful.”
Stephanie Gordon, a lifelong Hillsdale native, is the managing editor of the Student Stories Blog. She is married to chiropractor, Dr. Matt Gordon, and has three children – Eloise, Flora, and Jack. When she has a spare moment, she enjoys paleo baking, floating on Baw Beese Lake, and breaking a sweat at the gym.
Published in December 2022