Journalism: the ever-evolving field

I've wanted to become a journalist since I was nine years old. It started when I met a reporter from Gannett News Service, who planted the idea in my head. It made sense; even then, I loved to write and meet interesting people. Nearly ten years later, I still can't imagine myself pursuing anything else but a career in print journalism.

When I told this to Prof. David Johnson, he succinctly told me that print is dead. 

This isn't anything I haven't heard before. Almost everyone I've told my plans to, including print journalists themselves, has expressed skepticism. And for good reason.

Print is on the decline. Hundreds of newspapers across America have begun to fold, and not just small local papers.  The Rocky Mountain News. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Papers that serve hundreds of thousands of people have gone completely online or no longer exist.

Today, I had lunch with two reporters from Gannett (one of whom was the reporter I met ten years ago). I asked them what they thought of The New York Times charging for web access. They told me that they think that people need to pay for their news. How that will happen in an online world, they aren't sure. 

"Maybe we could charge people three cents a story," one suggested. "I don't know. I can't figure out the exact technology of it."

I mulled over that conversation for a while afterward. Two points jumped out at me. Firstly, even as a potential journalist who would like to earn a salary, I'm not sure if people should be obliged to pay for their news. Does truth really have a price tag? In the words of Gay Talese, "The truth is hard, first of all, to get. And harder still to communicate. And more hard to make money on!" I suppose therein lie the current difficulties of journalism.

The journalists I met today were disparaging of blogs. I disagree with that. One would have to be narrow-minded to overlook the importance of citizen journalism in many instances, especially recently. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya. And in the Nip article "Citizen journalism in China: The case of the Wenchuan earthquake," the author describes how citizens were the first people on the scene after a 2008 earthquake, providing a rare critique of a Communist regime.

Would that have been possible if one had to pay for their words? Probably not. Where the free press does not exist, citizens must tell their own stories. That, I believe, is why a blog or a Twitter cannot charge, while the NYT can.

Still, I believe that one must be more skeptical of blogs and personal Twitters than of major media outlets. Johnson made the point that the NYT places a corrections box every day in its print edition. Citizen journalists rarely correct themselves so thoroughly; they are not upheld to the same standards of ethics as a media organization of long-standing repute. Johnson provided the example of the blog "A Gay Girl in Damascus," which was in actuality written by a German man. He claimed that we should have known this fraud immediately because "there aren't any lesbians in Syria!" While amusing, his warning rings true.

The need to make money and the need to report truth are two factors that will have to be reconciled in the future. Whether from advertisers, or from paid online subscriptions, news outlets need money to survive, while personal blogs do not. While somewhat disheartening, the NYT’s decision is entirely understandable.


I think that both newspapers and blogs have their place. Both should be trusted, but newspapers should always be trusted more. While no source can ever be truly objective and factually perfect, newspapers will always be more so than personal blogs. That is one of the reasons that I believe that the field of journalism will always have a future and that professional journalists will always be employed. In a way, the journalists I met with were right in being disparaging of blogs. Media outlets simply have more resources; they have the potential to reach more people and to be more a powerful and trusted force.

The second point that jumped out at me during my lunch today was that the reporter claimed to be unable to understand the technology changing his job field. This seems to me a gaping hole in his knowledge bank.

A fact from the Pew study that saddened me was that 51% of people get their news from social media like Facebook. To me, that devalues journalism: that people want to see what's on their newsfeed before they see what's happening in the world.

But upon further reflection, I realized what a tool social media can be. Not only in terms of citizen journalism, in which it has created revolutions, but on our own shores. One of America’s weaknesses is that it has a very uneducated voter population. Perhaps social media can play an important role in changing that weakness.

But I hesitate to suggest that online news is sweeping up the nation. According to the Pew study, only 2% of people receive their news exclusively online. And the research suggested that those who do receive their news online are primarily privileged: high incomes and education levels, and Caucasian. And unsurprisingly, young.

And because of that, I hesitate to not suggest that online news is sweeping the nation. Young people are obviously the future. The generation of people who simply enjoy reading a physical paper is passing by. More importantly, printed papers cost too much.

Perhaps I will never write for a newspaper that is physically printed and distributed. This doesn't bother me. When I say I want to enter print journalism, I mean that I want to write. I'll write for a website, for an iPad, for whatever technology is the next big hit by the time I graduate college. I don't want to enter this field to hear the sound of my own voice; I want others to use my voice to find out what they need to know.

Because I believe that journalists, foremost, are interpreters. They are the first responders to an event and their version of the story is what the public will read. As a Gannett reporter told me at lunch, "I don’t know if what I do will be remembered. But people have a right to know what I write, and in that sense, what I do is necessary."

I don't worry about my future as a journalist. I know the field will be very different in five years than it is today, and that I may need to adapt my skill set to meet its needs, but I also know that it will never be dead. I don't think new technologies need to be adapted to meet the needs of journalism; rather, journalism needs to adapt itself to different types of media. Whether on a piece of paper, television, radio, blog, or iPad, someone will always need to report the news, and I intend to do just that.