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Re: Speechless - washingtonismoney - 11-25-2014

I never even did a college newspaper so I'd argue even that is unnecessary.

Still, I disagree it's a dying profession, though that may be motivated reasoning.

Re: Speechless - stupac2 - 11-25-2014

(11-25-2014, 10:25 AM)washingtonismoney link Wrote:I never even did a college newspaper so I'd argue even that is unnecessary.

Still, I disagree it's a dying profession, though that may be motivated reasoning.

Employment in journalism (even if you count buzzfeed et al) has to be going down pretty significantly. It probably won't hit 0 within our lives, even in traditional journalism, but it's hard to argue that the job prospects are as rosy as most other careers.

Re: Speechless - yvonne - 11-25-2014

Newspapers began shrinking long before 2001. The reason I went into specialized tech journalism after I left Track & Field News was that I couldn't find another full-time sportswriting gig, and a regular newspaper job wouldn't pay the rent even in the early 1990s.



Re: Speechless - TreeWeird - 11-25-2014

My son is a junior in college working on a journalism major and digital cinema minor.  He's a videographer.  To him and most of his contemporaries, journalism has nothing to do with newspapers. 

Re: Speechless - CTcard - 11-25-2014

(11-25-2014, 12:09 PM)TreeWeird link Wrote:My son is a junior in college working on a journalism major and digital cinema minor.  He's a videographer.  To him and most of his contemporaries, journalism has nothing to do with newspapers.

I think the key question going forward is whether it has anything to do with employment.

Re: Speechless - TreeWeird - 11-25-2014

People who know how to find and tell stories are and always will be employable.  Some will work in conveying news stories and some will drift into marketing or other business fields as they always have.  Younger folks today create and consumer plenty of news stories.  I would submit they get more news than ever.  They just don't get it from old school newspapers (for good or ill).

Newspapers may be dying, but news is not.  If a university journalism program is still equating journalism with newspapers, then it will also die, but I suspect most programs are evolving. 

Re: Speechless - yvonne - 11-25-2014

The thing is that blogs often want people to contribute for free.

Re: Speechless - CTcard - 11-25-2014

(11-25-2014, 12:28 PM)TreeWeird link Wrote:People who know how to find and tell stories are and always will be employable.  Some will work in conveying news stories and some will drift into marketing or other business fields as they always have.  Younger folks today create and consumer plenty of news stories.  I would submit they get more news than ever.  They just don't get it from old school newspapers (for good or ill).

Newspapers may be dying, but news is not.  If a university journalism program is still equating journalism with newspapers, then it will also die, but I suspect most programs are evolving.

It may be worth noting that,
1. I was joking, and
2. I don't think there is any question that people want to consume news, but there does seem to be an aversion towards paying for it.

We have lots of journalists of various types on this board. My impression from them is that it has become a difficult way to make a living - but I am sure they'll tell us directly.

Re: Speechless - yvonne - 11-25-2014

(11-25-2014, 12:43 PM)CTcard link Wrote:...
2. I don't think there is any question that people want to consume news, but there does seem to be an aversion towards paying for it.

We have lots of journalists of various types on this board. My impression from them is that it has become a difficult way to make a living - but I am sure they'll tell us directly.

Spot on

Re: Speechless - Hulk01 - 11-25-2014

I took two journalism classes as a freshman.  I would never recommend majoring in the subject, but today’s students need, somehow and somewhere, to learn how to write reasonably well.  This problem has been festering for decades.  My 1975 law review received 27 student papers.  Only five did not require drastic revisions. 

Ancient history...or leading edge career move? - Redrum - 11-25-2014

Worked as reporter and editor after Stanford.  Had a great time not making much money in my SoCal home town.  A really vicious union battle won (just barely) by the Knight Ridder management resulted in the ISL-style destruction of some really good reporters' and editors' careers.  (One guy had his desk moved to a store room the very next day and was not provided with a phone.)  And,  the promised changes used as bait to sway enough of the editorial staff to vote for the company...well, those were never seen or discussed subsequently.
Very lucky happenstance--sharing a ride with an unfamiliar new Stanford grad to Stanford/USC game --eventually allowed me to resign and get out into the wide world.  Over the next two decades virtually every survivor and their successors either bailed or were laid off.  By the time Google became really useful,  I could not do a name search and find any of  the original 50+ that had any connection with journalism anywhere.  Even the havens to which my cohort fled to keep working in journalism imploded.  But I'm sure the kids who pay the $47 K bonus to get their tickets punched by UC's  journalism program will do better.

But the scary thing is the  whole college/university bubble will most likely deflate and it could  be an unpretty re-enactment of journalism's life journey.



Re: Speechless - CTcard - 11-25-2014

(11-25-2014, 04:18 PM)Hulk01 link Wrote:... but today’s students need, somehow and somewhere, to learn how to write reasonably well.  This problem has been festering for decades. 

Indeed, many decades. I believe I have seen Cicero complaining about the same.

I think we should reintroduce courses in rhetoric.

Re: Speechless - stupac2 - 11-25-2014

(11-25-2014, 09:28 PM)CTcard link Wrote:I think we should reintroduce courses in rhetoric.

I'm not sure if you're joking, but one of Stanford's requirements when I was there was PWR, which stood for "Program in Writing and Rhetoric", and you had to take two different courses over Freshman and Sophomore years.

Re: Speechless - CTcard - 11-25-2014

(11-25-2014, 09:44 PM)stupac2 link Wrote:[quote author=CTcard link=topic=11214.msg106542#msg106542 date=1416976128]I think we should reintroduce courses in rhetoric.

I'm not sure if you're joking, but one of Stanford's requirements when I was there was PWR, which stood for "Program in Writing and Rhetoric", and you had to take two different courses over Freshman and Sophomore years.
[/quote]

Well, half joking.
I am often frustrated with students' inability to write and craft an argument, but not sure a specific required course would do much good.
But a course in Rhetoric does have an appealing early 19th century anachronistic ring to it.

It appears PWR turned into freshman writing requirement by the time I was there. Didn't turn out to be all that useful. I did learn something about tightening up my writing while being savaged by John L'Hereux and Ron Hansen during a creative writing course.

Re: Speechless - washingtonismoney - 11-25-2014

I was once terrified when a TA complimented me for my ability to structure an essay, which is problematic for two reasons:

a) this is basic stuff
b) this is basic stuff I'm terrible at.

Re: Speechless - Mick - 11-25-2014

(11-25-2014, 12:09 PM)TreeWeird link Wrote:My son is a junior in college working on a journalism major and digital cinema minor.  He's a videographer.  To him and most of his contemporaries, journalism has nothing to do with newspapers.



Mick, in a Noah's bagels store with an SJ Mercury News sports page.  Loooooong stare from 30 something (not 20-something).  Mick: "Would you like to read this?  I'm almost done."  Youngster: "Uh...no thanks.  I'm just trying to remember the last time I saw someone reading a newspaper."

Re: Speechless - washingtonismoney - 11-25-2014

(11-25-2014, 10:23 PM)Mick link Wrote:Mick, in a Noah's bagels store with an SJ Mercury News sports page.  Loooooong stare from 30 something (not 20-something).  Mick: "Would you like to read this?  I'm almost done."  Youngster: "Uh...no thanks.  I'm just trying to remember the last time I saw someone reading a newspaper."

The problem for journalism is not at all that people aren't consuming it. More people are reading journalism now than at any previous point in human history. The problem is trying to figure out the correct business model to make money off of that attention. Personally, my belief is that it's extremely difficult to sow all this attention and be unable to harvest it as money -- which is why I believe things will end up fine for journalism. Whether that takes ten, twenty, whatever years I don't know.

(Of course, the real worry for journalists isn't the writers... it's the copy editors, layout folks, etc.)

Re: Speechless - CowboyIndian - 11-25-2014

(11-25-2014, 10:23 PM)Mick link Wrote:Mick, in a Noah's bagels store with an SJ Mercury News sports page.  Loooooong stare from 30 something (not 20-something).  Mick: "Would you like to read this?  I'm almost done."  Youngster: "Uh...no thanks.  I'm just trying to remember the last time I saw someone reading a newspaper."

Same thing happened to me just this weekend in the coffee shop at the Nugget in Reno. A middle-aged guy sat down next to me and marvelled that I was reading the paper. Said he hadn't seen anyone do that for a while. Of course, he continued to talk to me while I was trying to read, which is one of my real pet peeves. Why is it that when you're reading, people don't think you're doing anything and are actually looking to strike up a conversation?

Re: Speechless - CTcard - 11-26-2014

(11-25-2014, 11:01 PM)CowboyIndian link Wrote:[quote author=Mick link=topic=11214.msg106547#msg106547 date=1416979386]
Mick, in a Noah's bagels store with an SJ Mercury News sports page.  Loooooong stare from 30 something (not 20-something).  Mick: "Would you like to read this?  I'm almost done."  Youngster: "Uh...no thanks.  I'm just trying to remember the last time I saw someone reading a newspaper."

Same thing happened to me just this weekend in the coffee shop at the Nugget in Reno. A middle-aged guy sat down next to me and marvelled that I was reading the paper. Said he hadn't seen anyone do that for a while. 
[/quote]

Well, the Stanford Daily, and most every other student newspaper, is still published on paper. Those folks are relatively young.



Re: Speechless - stupac2 - 11-26-2014

(11-26-2014, 08:46 AM)garvin link Wrote:Interestingly, I was at a dinner of Daily alums in Pasadena after the Rose Bowl, and one of them had brought along his son, at the time a Stanford freshman. I mentioned that when I was a student, if you walked into a dining hall for breakfast, something on the order of two-thirds to three-fourths of the people would be looking at that morning's Daily. He looked skeptical and then, remembering where he was, a little pitying. "It's, um, not really like that anymore," he replied.

I read the NYT pretty regularly, but it wasn't super common. The pile of papers would run out most days, but the daily lasted the longest (I assume because it was the one that each dining hall got the most of). I mostly pre-iPhone, though, I imagine it's quite a bit different now, even from 2009.