With the digital age and less people interested in sticking their nose in newspapers it makes you wonder if journalism even exists. I’ll be honest, journalism is not what it used to be. Many of these fields and careers are not what they used to be.

Whether it is the stories, writing styles, presentation, skills, a lot of things have changed the past couple of years. In this article I will talk about where journalism is heading.

Higher Education

What better way to start than discussing higher education. When we have an interest or career we’d like to explore more in the future. Our first thought is, I will study X and Y during college.

Yet, with the talks around the corrupt college businesses we are slowly starting to realize that's not always the case. In fact, if you were to study journalism in college you might not even become a journalist! It’s the fact that any degree except for doctors, lawyers, etc can be used for various and almost any field. I believe because of this shift, journalism has taken a mass shift because essentially if anyone has enough curiosity and thirst for answers, they could be a journalist.

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Digital World

Image Credits: Josh Hild from Pexels

Adding on to what i said about anyone being a journalist, it is true. In the digital world there are so many journalists. Remember what I said about the presentation?

Well, they aren’t the typical paper and pen or writing software journalist. They are the type of journalist to record their adventures, document their findings, investigating pop culture moments, and so much more. You know those hour long videos or click bait thumbnails talking about the latest exploitation. You could see the digital world as a pro or con. For instance, one pro is that there is no limit to what you can produce or share. The con is that the competition is fierce and almost everyone is some type of journalist.

Audience

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Any field you go into the most crucial factor is… Who is your audience? This is especially important in journalism because our audience is either depleting or stretching things through all the competition. The platform you use can also be a deciding factor in this.

Journalism has depleted in the physical sense because nobody is paying a couple of cents to buy physical newspapers, instead they are paying subscriptions to the big journal companies to read news online. Maybe they don’t even want to read so instead they listen to a podcast or broadcasting. In some cases people just don’t have enough interest to read fascinating stories anymore. It is definitely sad and makes finding a job in this field more difficult.

Interest and Curiosity

In a way, I do believe journalists and their audience have lost passion for storytelling and no longer hold curiosity for the world. When I do find someone who displays those qualities it automatically captures my attention and makes me hopeful. If you do want to keep journalism alive, you have to make sure first, you believe and truly interested in whatever you are presenting.

Insights

For a school project, I decided to reach out to a couple of journalists. You best believe I was left unanswered but lucky two journalists did answer. I was able to speak with them and they too see a decline in the field however they have hope.

But, hope resides in us. That we will make it great again. I'm not going to lie, writing this made me realize that journalism still has a chance but it might never go back to the super power it once was. Though if you are good at what you do and sharpen your skills, you will do just fine out there.