When you meet someone new, you always get the same string of questions:
1. What’s your name? (You worry if they don’t ask this one.)
2. Where are you from?
3. What is your major?
After I tell my new acquaintance that I am going into print journalism, and then explain that that is newspapers and magazines, they almost always ask me: how do you feel now that the business is dying? My feelings greatly coincide with what Jennifer Sizemore, vice president and editor in chief of MSNBC.com, had to say about the future of journalism.
“The narrative about the sudden and tragic end of print newspapers is simply wrong,” Sizemore wrote.
With newspapers closing down all the time and people turning more and more to the Internet, it seems impossible that journalism won’t die. However, I promise that there is a future for journalism.
1. Journalism is evolving, not dying
The first thing that I always share with my friends about journalism is that you can’t kill journalism. The industry might be injured as technology develops, but journalism heals and adjusts to the blows from the ever-changing society.
2. Print is no longer text and pictures
With journalism shifting to websites, there are so many more options for reporting. Now story sharing can be more involved and more interactive with videos, slideshows, graphics and more. If a reader chooses, they can pretty much have their cake and eat it too.
3. Sources are everywhere on the Internet
Instead of pulling out the phone book and searching for potentially relevant sources, reporters are now able to use social media sites to find sources. People that Facebook, Tweet or Instagram a news tip become sources. This helps reporters get more relative sources in less amount of time.
4. The public “watchdog”
Journalists work for the people as a “watchdog”. The average person or blogger doesn’t have access to high profile people, say the President of the United States, so there will always be a need for the press.
5. “An open mind”
Sizemore said that you need to have “an open mind” about the future of journalism. It will always be changing, it will always be evolving and it will always be present.
Nice post. ‘Journalism is evolving, not dying’ sums it up. With the increase in digital media, probably it will get harder for smaller and local media companies to survive. So either they will need to adapt or they will go out of business. Plus, the room for number of newspapers who want to join and remain successful will be limited. Though on the digital front, the scene is some what the opposite.