Syfe posted:

In 2010 I went to school for journalism, after getting out in 2012, I re-entered school for graphic design after a year of trying to get a paying journalism job (I secured a graphic design job straight out of school.)

There were a lot of reasons, including finding graphic design during layout courses in journalism and certainly falling in love with that career as a possibility, but a lot of it was the dying formats across the board. Want to do radio? gently caress, you better just do pod casting, most radio jobs are hard held and want you to already have years of solid radio experience if you want to get into a possible open position. This is also true of pretty much everything, any attempt to get a job post school required having a massive amount of experience, or you work for free.

I stress that many places expected you to simply work for free for the experience, and not in a hold another job sort of way, you needed to have the time to devote your entire being to that free "job". Working for blog journalism doesn't help, because most big news blogs wanted three years experience at a syndicated newspaper. Never mind that most good journalism died with free bloggers doing it just because. Maybe it's the death of journalism as a job and it's now an extended hobby for people to simply report on things, but real journalism is part investigation, it is about digging deep into a story. But that's not what people are interested in these days.

So yeah, I think the bottom line is really the internet has stifled a lot of good journalism. I won't say all journalism, but... it's certainly a lesser creature now. People also enjoy the cult of personality a lot more these days, so columnist style writing is often just given the free ride as journalism, with all the bias an opinion that come from column writing, but being taken at journalism face value.

Will it stay that way? I don't know, I think journalism is largely still in a mode of transition and transformation. Many people, myself included, are pretty uncomfortable with digital subscriptions, but that market is far more penetrated now than it was when I got out of school and younger people hold less value on the physical over the digital ease. Ezines are still small and usually part of an existent physical medium. I guess it boils down to the fact that I think we need to separate blogging from journalism again, because the waters are muddy and shallow. I can't think of how many websites are just push the press release with some writer added fluff=news story.

I doubt all my concerns are fully founded, many are from that one year in which I worked my rear end off to try to get into something (with several in school journalism awards and a 4.0, which I point out not out of a pride of those accomplishments, but that you'd think that with those under my belt I could have been afforded a point to start that wasn't "work for free and we will see" ) with no successful end of a paying job doing what I spent time getting an education in.

Rabble Rabble, that's my opinion and experience therein, I offer it as strictly that.