The Future of Print Journalism?

Never once in the course of my childhood did I ever say, "I want to be a journalist when I grow up!" Nope. I wanted to be a marine biologist, a famous actress, a rock star, and a lawyer, but a reporter wasn't even on the radar. Neither was author, although I wrote my first detective story at the tender age of 11. When I had to pick a major my freshman year of college, I chose Sociology for lack of anything else I wanted to do. Colorado State University offers a criminology program for Sociology majors so I did that. Sophomore year I took a mass media class, and fell in love. The class covered everything: radio, TV, movies, journalism... I was entranced enough to add a second major and start completing my prerequisites for entering the Journalism school. Even then, when I met with my advisor and she asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered, "I want to write for Spin Magazine." Ha.

When I was in school, journalism was not facing the bleak future it is today. We knew that online media was likely going to overtake print journalism, but we thought of it in terms of The Future. As in, one day, aliens may visit us in The Future. We had no idea the collapse of the Rocky Mountain News was less than five years away.

Even with the security of the job market at that time, J-school students had to add to their resumes while they were still in school. Writing for the college newspaper was an absolute must, as was completing an internship. Both of my majors required an internship in order to graduate, and fortunately I was able to satisfy both schools' requirements by working for a specialty magazine that covered adoption/foster issues. I have no doubt that without that internship, I would have struggled to find a job following graduation. I basically won the equivalent of the lottery when a Denver-area newspaper had an opening for a police-beat reporter the same month I graduated. The Criminology degree didn't hurt either.

Watching newspaper after newspaper die has been heartbreaking. That's our history we're losing. But as journalists, we have to adapt, and sometimes that means leaving journalism for awhile to pay the bills. So many of my friends have had to find other writing jobs after being laid-off. I left willingly to raise my son, and to be honest, I am not optimistic about being able to re-enter the field if I want to. But to those J-school students who believe in the importance of the free press (as I still do), make sure you're doing what you need to do while you're in school, because the job market is only getting more cutthroat. Don't wait until your senior year to start writing for your school's paper or looking for an internship. Don't limit yourself, even if you need to pick a concentration within the major. Learn everything you can about newspaper, magazine and online writing. Master all three of those crafts, because they are different. Pick up a camera and learn how to use it. And possibly the most important (and something I didn't learn in school), learn Spanish. Bilingual reporters are worth their weight in gold, and there were several important stories that I covered where I was insanely frustrated with my inability to conduct an interview in Spanish.

The news is never going to go away. There is a certain amount of stability in choosing journalism as a career, but you have to be the best at what you do. All of us who work in journalism, even if we've been sidetracked a bit and we're now working for PR departments or writing technical articles, we need to keep fighting for the industry, for the newspapers that have been around since the 1800s. What we do is important. We inspire change and hold governments accountable. We give a voice to the little guy and expose corruption. So I'm asking everyone, students and veteran reporters, don't give up.