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oh those wacky college kids

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by txsportsscribe, Mar 4, 2009.

  1. txsportsscribe

    txsportsscribe Active Member

  2. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    This is the line I keep hearing from college kids. They are wrong, most of them are going to seriously regret this in 5-10 years, but there's no convincing them. Their professors all feed them the hogwash that if they know how to do podcasts and online photo galleries, the jobs will come to them.
     
  3. slappy4428

    slappy4428 Active Member

    When did our industry improve to shaky?
     
  4. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    Voakes was my favorite professor in school. Brilliant guy. But yeah, that's a tough sales pitch.
     
  5. zebracoy

    zebracoy Guest

  6. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

  7. Some Guy

    Some Guy Active Member

    I'm not so certain that 5 or 10 years from now, there won't be plenty of jobs in journalism, the likes of which I can't envision yet.

    But that's a leap of blind faith I don't think I'd be willing to take if I were going to college right now.
     
  8. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    I'm not going to say it's impossible or that I know the future, but I'm willing to bet against it.

    How many web sites have found a way to support paid content-producers? This is a problem that has been on the table for almost a decade now with no one coming up with a workable solution.
     
  9. Some Guy

    Some Guy Active Member

    I think there will always be a place for journalists. I don't know how they will be monetized, and I think the days of even the stars earning an upper-middle class living are over.

    BUT .... people are always going to want the news. There will be some sort of jobs out there in the future.

    Like I said earlier, it would be too much of an uncertain tightrope for me to walk if I were coming out of college.
     
  10. Andy _ Kent

    Andy _ Kent Member

    The second commenter hit the nail on the head:

    "The professors and advisers are doing their students an incredible disservice.
    They are allowing them to spend tens of thousands of dollars on an
    undergraduate education that is now as practical as a major in art history or
    philosophy while letting them believe that, if they are just versatile enough, it
    will all be okay in the job market. It won't.

    There are no jobs waiting for all but a small fraction of these students. They
    are wasting their time and their money. The industry has had almost a
    decade to figure out a business model that will support the newsgathering
    force this country is accustomed to, and it has failed. The problems are the
    exact same problems faced by every single content-generating web business
    since the dot-com bust: people are unwilling to pay for content on the
    internet and advertising revenues have never remotely approached the levels
    they have seen in print and over the air.

    This post will doubtlessly be shrugged off by the students and professors
    who tell themselves that you can support yourself, let alone a family, writing
    blogs and putting up photo galleries to a web site. You can't. I hope some of
    you realize that while changing careers is still as simple as filing a change of
    major."
     
  11. 2muchcoffeeman

    2muchcoffeeman Well-Known Member

    And if they want to leave newspapers, it's a piece of cake to get a job in another field because of your newspaper skills.
     
  12. Bob Cook

    Bob Cook Active Member

    I would say a journalism degree isn't completely useless, because you're proving you know how to write and communicate, and these days you also learn multimedia skills. In other words, you've got the flexibility to go in all sorts of different directions and career paths.

    Being a journalist, particularly for a newspaper, in and of itself ain't a great career move, to be sure. But you can move to the head of the line for a lot of jobs if you know how to write and communicate in multiple formats. Most of the world can't even do it in one.
     
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