No. 1 - Adapting to changes in the journalism industry

I started thinking about how to adapt to changes in the journalism industry right after I toured MU’s school of journalism. When I decided that I wanted to major in journalism I had to confront the fact that journalism may not best career path to choose, from the perspective of my my parents, based on job loss across the industry. I had to rationalize spending thousands of dollars on a degree that may not even guarantee that I could secure a job in that field after graduation.

This was my junior year of high school, and I had yet to sit down and look at exactly what was the cause of job decline in the journalism industry. Maybe I thought it was that less people were consuming the news, or that there was a lack of trust in journalists by the general public. However, based off of articles I read giving advice about the field, I knew that in order to make myself more hirable I would have to possess as many skills as possible and go to a university that would give me great experience and provide me with great connections.

It was on my tour of the journalism school at MU that I first heard about convergence journalism, and it was in that moment that I knew that was going to be the emphasis that I would choose. I heard about how hard it was, and I didn’t even see what the students were actually doing in the class, but I knew based off of the short pitch about the program from one of the faculty that convergence journalism was exactly what I was looking for.

It was after the tour that I really talked about the concerns with entering into the field journalism with my father. Since we were going over the cost of attending MU, it seemed relevant to talk about what I would be getting out of the program. Even though I was confident that MU’s J School was the best fit for what I wanted, I was still concerned about finding a job after graduation. In my mind, if there was wide spread job loss, maybe my chances of finding a job in journalism were as low as anybody else. It was my dad who pointed out that even if there was a decline in jobs available in the industry that journalism would never go away. He suspected that what we are seeing now is a restructuring of the industry, and that jobs in journalism will change. There may be less jobs associated with newspapers available, but there will be more online journalism or media jobs. I was shocked to find that my dad was more optimistic about the future of journalism than I was. It should have been his job to be more critical about my future plans than I was.

Now, almost four years later, I have a better grasp of what changes are happening and in the journalism industry and why they are happening. I have been able to study the changes in the industry from an academic perspective, and read about possible solutions

. This summer I was also able to see changes being made by newspapers in order to keep up with the changing markets. Much of what I saw over the summer had not been talked about in my journalism classes.

My goal for this blog is to talk about the changes I saw this summer, and to talk about other ideas and perspectives that I have learned at school and will pick up through my reporting semester with J4804.

From left: On my last day at my internship I went down to visit the printing press, which no longer runs. The first day I came to visit campus the spring flowers were in full bloom. I took in the beauty of the quad for the first time, spring of 2016.