The scary state of journalism

Journalism is scary. Everyone are loosing their jobs, students out of college can’t find jobs, people aren’t buying newspapers. It’s just real scary.

SPJ’s shining speaker Hagit Limor gave us hope first thing at the spj conference. She told us her story about starting her career in the worst year for journalism to date. She said she went from town to town to town begging for a job wherever she could find one. Eventually, she did. And she learned. And she got better.

That’s what Hagit says we as young journalists should do. She believes we have the advantage in this new medium, and I agree. Us young, tech-savvy college kids have no problem learning how to pick up our own video camera and learning to write our own interview questions, then shooting and editing and posting our package on a news site. No big.

Hagit said it’s harder for those who have been in the buisiness for years to learn how to do these things that come naturally to us. We can do it, and they can’t. So hooray for us. In a few years our know-how could dominate the media, coming up with new formulas for handing out news. We will have fresh ideas for the most effective way to keep the news industry alive.

She admits that newspapers are dying, but newspapers are dinosaurs. And sure, dinosaurs are fun to think about and remember how cool they were, but today we have new things, much cooler than dinosaurs. Like computers. Computers, and blogs, and twitter, and facebook, and youtube, and a million other online meduim that will work as tools for us to use to be the best journalists we can.

Don’t be scared, she told us, be excited and ready. And we should be. It’s cool to think about that we might be able to do in the near future.

Bye bye old dinosaurs, hello super-cool space age.

–Jordan Bodkin, SPJ UT Austin