Journalism Isn’t What It Used To Be: Are You Sure You Can Handle It As A Writer?

How is a journalist supposed to keep up with online social media? It seems that when something happens in the world, people on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ know about it almost immediately. There’s no way journalist can compete with that, but maybe they don’t have to, and the smart journalists are using these social networks as a source of information, and they are able to tell real-life stories based on what they collect on the Internet.

This would make sense to most of us, however, how do you train a new journalist graduating from college in all these new high-tech tools, all this new news syndication, and how does it help the industry journalistic to take advantage of these social networks to sell advertising, collect income and exploit them as news sources?

That is a difficult task because the industry is changing so fast because of the Internet and the way Americans receive their news. It seems as if the universities and trade schools that teach journalists cannot keep up.

There was an interesting article recently in Media Shift that was titled; “Journalism Textbooks Suffers Slow Road to Publishing” By Alexa Capeloto Aug 11, 2011 Very insightful, well researched and to the point, find this article online and read it. Then I’d like to discuss some fundamental issues and some philosophy around these changes.

Alexa analyzes the textbook publishing, writing, and production cycle and suggests, and rightly so in my opinion, that textbooks for Journalism School courses are outdated the day they arrive in the classroom and completely out of date. contact. Many are saying that the news industry, especially the newspaper industry, print is dead.

One of the founders of Google said about four years ago that the newspaper industry was on its last leg. He stated that he did not know when he would actually die, only that he would, and he suspected that it would occur in the next 10 years. Now as a baby boomer I like to read the newspaper, but obviously also, like everyone else, I get my information online. Eventually, all the information will be online, and the old newspaper, which is actually an inefficient way of delivering news, will no longer be available. That day is coming, we all know it.

So maybe journalist schools and their textbooks should be perpetual, maybe they should be constantly evolving and remain digital. That would solve the problem, though it doesn’t bode well for the textbook publishing industry, because if journalism is shifting to digital textbooks, and journalism students are also writers, that means the whole place of Text at our colleges and universities will also change, and there will be fewer jobs available in the sector. These textbooks will have become digital and interactive. In fact, I hope you will please consider all this and think about it.