Our disgruntled young journalists

With many predictions swirling around for what 2008 will hold, allow me to continue the gimmick.

I believe that 2008 will be the beginning of a movement in journalism where graduates will opt to carve their own path rather than be another layoff at a slow adopting newspaper or magazine.

What do I mean by “carve their own path”? In short, the Internet and the entrepreneurial spirit.

I think some young journalists are growing increasingly frustrated with playing by someone else’s rules. Rules that require innovation to shoot up the corporate hierarchy and back down again. Thus making someone’s bright idea in January old news by February. These rules still play by the old concepts of distribution. And these rules have journalism students busting their asses for an internship that pays nothing, when a well-written blog can pull in enough to at least pay for

One, “Generation-Y” (I absolutely hate that term, but thats most likely another blog post) features a large number of entrepreneurs. Enough that Inc magazine declares “may well be on its way to becoming the most entrepreneurial generation in our nation’s history”. The article rightly states that we saw many of our parents that were laid off or outsourced, and we want avoid that fate.

And two, our generation is increasingly becoming disgruntled with larger national trends such as paying into Social Security that we will never see, the decrease of medical benefits, and the loss of pensions from the job market. To me, this takes nearly every advantage away from being part of a large corporation. I’m aware that the increase in individual student loan debt might counteract this, but I feel that we more than any other generation literally have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Perhaps I am being short sighted, and I know that nearly every writer would like to start their own magazine someday but never before that the resources been so cheap and so readily available. And never before has the “traditional path” looked less appealing.