ONE LAST THING
Here Now the News Journalism in transition, will survive the demise of the newspaper industry By Kevin Convey he sat across from me and waited, tapping the edge of the admissions brochure on my desk and staring frankly into my eyes. She had just dropped the question I hear more often than any other in my conversations with parents of prospective journalism students. “I mean, my daughter loves writing and working for her school’s paper and radio station,” she said. “But I’m wondering: Why should she waste her time studying journalism? I mean, it’s a dying industry, right? What is she going to do with that degree?” Why study journalism, indeed? It was a question I had pondered periodically throughout my life: first as a classicsEnglish major burning to make my mark in newspapers; later, as editor-in-chief of the Boston Herald and the Daily News; and, finally, as the new chair of the journalism department here, attempting to convince wary parents that they can’t, in fact, believe everything they read, and that society needs journalists more than ever. Who tells us that our own government is spying on us if not journalists? Who makes sure we get the information we need to make informed civic decisions if not journalists? Who tells us about the forces and trends that will shape our lives if not journalists? So, I told this parent what I believe: It is ironic but true that the current explosion of news and information on the Web—the very same force that is shuttering newspapers and inking all the journalism-is-dead headlines—is making the skills we teach more important than ever. The ability to think critically and creatively, to verify information and present it fairly, to sift the important from the trivial, to aggregate and curate, to work in teams, to communicate clearly in person and in writing and to thrive in an atmosphere of constant change—these are crucial attributes in our information-overloaded era. Real employers are offering real jobs paying real money to candidates who pos-
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sess them, both inside and outside of journalism. These are skills prized by employers of every stripe. Just ask the journalism majors of QU’s Class of 2013—92 percent are either working or in grad school. The confusion about job prospects in the field arises from a popular tendency to conflate the fate of newspapers with that of journalism. As my former NYU colleague Clay Shirky has said: “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” As a lifelong printie, I might quibble with the former. Large legacy-media operations such as newspapers still do most of the journalistic heavy lifting around the world. But I heartily endorse the latter. And, more important, so does the market. How else to explain the explosion of
new communications jobs—projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to reach 342,000 by the year 2020. How else to explain the wholesale defection of brand names such as Ezra Klein and Nate Silver from old-media to new-media startups during the last year? I finished, took a breath and I asked the parent if she had any other questions. She smiled, said no, stood, shook my hand and left me alone with my thoughts. Last week I learned that her daughter has applied to QU for next fall. It seems she wants to be a journalist. The School of Communications was ranked among the top 20 journalism schools in the recent NewsPro-RTDNA poll of news professionals.
Stan Godlewski
Kwegyirba Croffie ’11 is a reporter for It’s Relevant, where she blends her writing and video skills to produce digital news packages.