Sean Blanda

There as been a lot of buzz around the media-journo-blogosphere lately about the demands placed on young journalists. As someone who is graduating (hopefully) in May, allow me to give an idea of my “strategy” for the upcoming job search: be selfish.

First, we must see that there are several Pros and Cons to our current situation (by “our” I mean my fellow students):

Pro:

1. The Baby Boomer effect. Over the course of the next few years, the Baby Boomers will be retiring creating a huge vacuum of talent in every American industry (however, see #1).
2. The Unknown. The reason I’m so excited to enter this field is that most of the conventional wisdom of the industry is no longer holding to be true. New ideas are needed, and I think we students can help. Nobody can even pretend they know what direction the media landscape is headed. Therefore the ability to learn quickly and adapt are almost as important as what you know.
3. Everybody can be a star.  For the first time ever, it is possible to establish yourself as a journalist or writer outside of traditional channels.  Can’t get a job?  Then make one.

Con:

1. The hiring freezes. I can’t fill in a personal anecdote here, but I feel like I see story after story about layoffs, downsizes and hiring freezes at newspapers and magazines
2. The rich kids. I think journalism’s (especially in magazines) dirty little secret is that it is incredibly hard to support yourself on an internship of entry level job. In magazines you pretty much have to move to New York City where the cost of living is high and the entry level jobs pay $10-$13 an hour. Many internships require a student to move away from home, find housing, support themselves all for a low end stipend or no pay at all. Now I am sure there are exceptions, but as a whole, students who need to support themselves cant land themselves in the more prestigious internships.
3. Nobody knows what to do. Its a very disturbing feeling to be sitting in class learning “new media” that you know will be obsolete in a few months (and that’s even if they teach new media at all). Which is why I love professors who are just adjuncts who hold a day job at a newspaper or magazine, I feel like they have to keep up as part of their jobs, and pass that wisdom on to students.

So what to do?

Its not new that we need to know how to tell a story on any platform and know how to write. But I think the best advice is to step outside of journalism and into business and economics.

We have been called the selfish generation and I think young journalists need to start acting like it. Think of yourself as a business.  Realize that you need to be able to sell yourself.  Step out of the employee-employer dynamic and into the contractor-client dynamic. There are going to be a glut of journalism majors graduating in the next few years into an industry that is scared to hire anybody. So we have to separate ourselves more than the previous generation in terms of skills and talent sets. There is more of a survival of the fittest aspect than ever, so make sure you have your act together.

We also need to come to the realization that most professors are not going to teach us the practical skills we need to know and will simply talk in abstracts like “the industry is changing” and “learn web stuff”. Lock yourself in your room for three hours with a Photoshop book and poke around. Become proficient in all of the programs, techniques being used in newsrooms, and even come up with some new ones.

Unfortunately, no one is going to help the next generation of writers. That’s not to say that no one wants to, but no one can. It up to us to help ourselves and each other.

Or maybe we should just stop trying to change the current system and start from the ground up.  But that’s another post…