The accidental cyberjournalist: why do so few j-school students plan to go into online news?
Palser, Barb
Most of today's online journalists share a common bond: We all
planned to do something else. In college we saw our future selves
pounding the pavement, hammering out column inches, reading the evening
news or catching the perfect camera shot--and many of us spent years
doing those things. We never meant to wind up on the Web; it wasn't
even an option.
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The current generation of journalism grads, however, should be
different. Having grown up with the Internet and being heavy online news
users themselves, one would expect a fair number of them would be
planning to hitch their professional wagons to the medium of the future.
But, not so much.
When I visit journalism classrooms, I always ask how many students
plan to be online journalists. The response, almost always, is none.
Maybe one. A few colleagues have reported the same puzzling and somewhat
humbling experience.
The University of Georgia's Annual Survey of Journalism and
Mass Communication Graduates at 97 schools backs that up. The 2004
report revealed that far more students go after jobs in traditional
media (20.6 percent for TV and 19.5 percent for daily newspapers) than
the Internet (6.5 percent).
But the most publicized headline of the 2004 report was that the
median starting salary for j-school graduates who take online jobs is
$32,000, higher than for any other sector. Cable TV jobs followed at
$30,000; newspapers were $26,000 and broadcast TV was a paltry $23,492.
It's not about money. If it were, they'd major in
computer engineering and pick up a sweet $51,297 out of school. But
isn't this the generation that's abandoning newspapers faster
than any other? The Pew Research Center's reports--and plenty of
other research--tell us that 18- to 29-year-olds rely less on newspapers
and more on the Internet for news than any other age group. These kids
are literally leading the new-media migration. Why, then, are so many of
them boarding the old-media ship--especially when it's casting off
staff at a worrisome rate?
There are several likely reasons, and most of them are not about
journalism education. There's no doubt that colleges and
universities have been slow to embrace or even understand online news as
a core part of the curriculum. But there already are a lot of good
graduate programs out there, and at this moment brilliant folks are
working on efforts to revitalize journalism education; the
Carnegie-Knight initiative led by former MSNBC.com Editor in Chief
Merrill Brown is one example.
An obvious reason for the meager interest in pure online journalism jobs is that there aren't enough of them. Media companies are still
structured so that virtually all of their reporting resources are tied
to the core medium, with a small team assigned to repurpose that work
for the Web. ("Repurposing" has a monotonous ring; no wonder
interest is low.)
Meanwhile some companies are moving--nominally, at least--toward a
merged newsroom in which everyone contributes to all channels.
That's the gist of the New York Times' recent decision to
combine its print and digital news staffs. So it's also possible
that some students seeking jobs in print and broadcast assume
they'll work on the Web as well. One in five students in the
University of Georgia survey who landed a job is doing some amount of
writing and editing for the Web.
That philosophy has merit; everyone in a news organization should
have a little bit of Internet in his or her job description. But
there's a danger that the converged newsroom will cheat itself out
of the online expertise it needs in order to compete. As traditional
news companies vie with online news aggregators, Internet-only newsrooms
and now a flood of community journalism networks, they need to dedicate
more specialists to the Web. They need to be doing more than
repurposing; they should be cultivating community journalism, refining
online storytelling and multimedia formats, learning best practices in
design and layout.
Cross-pollination is a great thing; today's online news
managers and editors are well served by their previous experience in
print and broadcast. It's also encouraging that so many students
are still following traditional media programs because that means
they're probably interested in reporting, and we're all dead
in the water without good reporters.
At the same time, online news should have evolved by now beyond a
supporting role, something people stumble into when they meant to do
something else. It should be a destination vocation: a career that
promises high satisfaction and attracts people who aspire to it.
Perhaps those people aren't going to come from journalism
schools in the near term. Skills like multimedia storytelling and
community-building certainly are different from conventional reporting
and editing. Identifying and encouraging the right young people wherever
they are--and snagging them before Google does--would be the best thing
the industry could do for its future.
It's been fun operating in our ad hoc style, everybody with a
different vision of what an online journalist does, everybody from
different backgrounds. But it'd be gratifying to walk into a
classroom and see a few more hands of students who understand the job
and want to do it.
Barb Palser is director of content for Internet Broadcasting Systems Inc. Her e-mail address is barb@ibsys.com.
