What would you tell a journalism student?

What advice would you impart on today’s students?

What would you say to students who are graduating this winter and next spring, during one of the worst economic times in recent memory?

Would you comfort them? Would you tell them to flee? Would you tell them to believe?

Would you be honest about how many newspapers will simply disappear? They can’t evolve. They’ll hold onto their romanticism of the newspaperman as we bury them in newspaper-lined coffins.

And yet all around us, new media organizations sprout like desert roses — glimmers of hope in the darkest of times. They reinvent journalism, while they shed the anachronisms of yesterday’s beliefs.

Would you point to Spot.Us, TechCrunch and Everyblock as rays of hope? Or has hope forsaken you?

As for me, I don’t know what I would say. I’m both deeply scared and yet forever hopeful for what lies ahead in journalism. I see incredible innovation and vast devastation.

It is with deep regret that I must inform today’s and tomorrow’s journalism students that it is them who must reinvent journalism because their predecessors have failed.

bored_at_work

I would tell journalism students that they are learning excellent writing and information management skills that will propel their careers–just not at a newspaper.
http://www.grizzoulian.com Colin O’Keefe

We ‘must reinvent journalism?’ We GET TO reinvent journalism. It’ll be tough to sway traditionalists (that time is coming to an end though) and at times will be rough on the wallet but I wouldn’t pick any other point in history to be graduating from journalism school. We’re in a time when it’s so easy to get your voice and your work out there. Now, let’s just figure out the best way to get paid for it…
http://www.tamark.ca/students Mark Hamilton

I’d say: Forget every preconceived notion you have about what journalism is. Prepare to learn and keep learning for the rest of your career/life. Find your passion in journalism, because that’s what’s going to keep you going.

I’d tell them: you now have the tools at hand that give you the potential to tell the stories you want to tell, in the ways you want to tell them, and to many more people than was ever possible before.

And I’d tell them that the best journalists will have no trouble of thriving in whatever the mediascape is becoming, so your deepest desire has to be to do whatever you need to put yourself in that company.
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http://mccunications.blogspot.com Cynthia McCune

I tell my students to embrace the web and social media, because the future of news is online. I tell them no one has yet figured out what the next business model of journalism will be…so they have an opportunity to help create it.

I recently spoke to junior college journalism students at the JACC NorCal conference. Here’s what I told them: http://www.slideshare.net/camccune/starbucks-journalism-presentation/