What are the benefits to pursuing a career in creative writing rather than journalism?

I have a degree in creative writing and I know a bunch of people with degrees in Journalism. Creative writing is more personal. It's fiction, nonfiction, memoirs. If you want to be a college professor or an author, creative writing is more relevant. Creative writing is more about storytelling, whereas Journalism is more about relaying the facts. What happened. As a journalist, you have to be impartial to the subject of your writing.

I'll give you an example:

If you're writing about a fire that burned down a community, as a journalist you can tell the stories of the people in that community, you can discuss the effects on the community and the facts of what happened, but you can't have an opinion about it.

If you're a creative writer and you're writing about a fire that burned down the community, you can tell the story from the point of view of anyone you want. And it doesn't have to be true (unless you're writing nonfiction.) You can tell the story of what it feels like to be the fire, consuming the community. Or you can tell the story of the kid that lives in the community, whose life is forever changed by the fire, and you can use this fire as the catalyst for the story of his life.

So it depends on what kind of writing you want to do. If you want to be a reporter, go into journalism. If you want to be a copywriter or author, go into Creative writing.

They go hand in hand if you explore Creative Nonfiction. This is know as the Literature of Fact and I just go done formatting someone's piece for Kobo.com; you want to get out there you have to know the tools within the field as there are nonprofits who fight the scientific community. There are nonprofits that go against medicine and promote Complimentary Alternative Medicine -- so you want in the field don't get caught in the newsletter rut. There are places to work with right out of the box such as Draft2Digital.com and The Book Patch.com. Get books from the websites respective authors before you start though because you have to take up book design and some engineering websites to calibrate the direction.