After an interesting year of online journalism, I learned quite a bit as to what is going on in the industry, both good and bad. Almost every class or professor that I’ve had at Maryland has made mention of the fact that jobs are dwindling in the print field and if you want a good job you will have to have Web capabilities as well as a willingness to cut and shoot video.
As we’ve learned in class there are jobs available on the online side of things, they just might not be your prototypical job that you always thought you would have. Instead you could be a full-time blogger that is expected to be constantly updating Twitter.
The immediacy of the new digital world is both a positive and a negative in my mind. I personally like the fact that if I am the first one to write a story I can get it up right away on to the Web site instead of waiting for it to appear the next day in a newspaper. The Internet finally gives print reporters an edge over television and radio, which could run a story with fairly shoddy details on the air.
But along with that are the negatives in that you basically will always expected to be ready to write a story. If a story breaks at 2 a.m. in the morning you will be expected to get some sort of Twitter or blog post up right away and just keep reporting as you learn more. Along with this immediacy is the increased chance of an error, which is a bit scary to this young journalist.
All it takes is one really bad error and you could be out of the business. Even moreso is the increased pressure that has led young writers like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair to fabricate stories.
I think some of the other positives are the cool things that a lot of Web sites are doing. Whether it be getting their reporters to do podcasts, weekly video newscasts, or even chats. To some that will just seem like unnecessary added job responsibilities, but I personally find a lot of that type of innovation pretty cool. Journalists who might never have gotten a chance to get in front of the camera are now getting chances to become their paper’s prime personality.
To be perfectly honest this class has woken up my eyes a bit to the industry and I’ve begun to at least look at other fields, such as public relations, law school, and business. That’s in part because a lot of those industries are looking for journalists to man their Web site or simply handle media requests.
I certainly would like to have something in journalism but feel a bit behind the curve with HTML, which I feel like could be an issue in the long run. I always kind of imagined myself as the typical print beat reporter working my way up the ladder before getting either a major beat or a column of some sort. Unfortunately most newspapers won’t be around for me to work my way up the field. That is unless I start out at a major newspaper like The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times right after college, which is doubtful at best.
But hopefully with more insistence on video editing, radio work, I’ll have a shot at finding a career.
