During my first day of classes, one of my professors made it blatantly clear that she doesn’t believe journalists have any shot at getting a job upon graduation; that journalists are essentially signing up to be poor for the next 10 years. While this professor was semi-accurate about the pay (if you are pursuing journalism thinking you’re going to be a millionaire, I encourage you to change fields now), she was not right about the fact that journalists can’t get a job after graduation.
Unfortunately, it seems as though she has bought into the fallacy that print is dying because the Internet is overtaking all other forms of media. This notion, however, is inaccurate. It’s simply not how media works. People don’t abandon one form of media for another, but rather make room in their lives for the new media outlet while hanging on to the style they already love. So, in the hopes that professors follow this blog, I’m posting these two videos that show proven facts about media and the rising sales of print magazines.
The 20 Tweetable Truths About Magazines
Magazine Publishers of America are also running their “Magazines, the Power of Print” ad campaigns within the print editions of more than 100 titles. These ads are so powerful and they use multiple magazine titles to prove that magazines are thriving rather than disappearing. Yes, some magazines have folded in recent years (R.I.P. Gourmet), but numerous titles have launched and proven themselves successful (Yay, Food Network Magazine!)
I understand that newspapers have taken a slight turn for the worse, but please don’t keep telling students that print is going to be dead soon. It’s simply not true. And I plan on proving this professor wrong by landing a job in the magazine industry soon after I graduate.
I agree. I think that journalists will have a lot of new opportunities with more options than ever before. People still want the same information they’ve been used to getting for years. They actually want more because it’s more accessible. And, they want valid information, which is where journalists come in. We’re the ones who provide accurate information and in-depth information.
Journalists have NEVER really made lots of money, so that’s not a new development. I think the job of journalists is just going to change from just reporting to editing, filming, marketing, using technology, etc.
We’ve still got opportunities! I’m not in it for the money 🙂 Good luck this year, Sam!
Although your thoughts are interesting, I’m afraid you might want to heed the words of your professor as he or she has more knowledge in the subject than yourself. I feel that your defending print media and the notion that its not dieing is prehaps an effort to affirm a wishful place in the world of journalism, and more of a hope that this were true. You spoke about how in history no one has ever abandoned one media for another, simply “adjusted”. Well you see, just because more pictures are viewed online than in those 24 packs from the drugstore, it doesn’t mean they don’t use a camera. More magazines now are offered in PDF format as a first option, because it really is good logic, and a snail mail copy via print as the second option. See the reason that print media is actually dieing is because of innovation, and the way the innovation makes sense to use. IE a magazine company, just as any other company, is run on money. It saves money to have readers view the articles on their computers, and it also ensures more of a readership. People are spending more time with screens, than print. This is just a fact. Journalism and print media are adjusting to the logical benefits of this, and its not just a new adjustment, they have been proactively trying to ween their readership towards online documents for years. If you still don’t believer this, I suggest getting your resources from places other than paid advertisements that serve as a last ditch effort to stimulate the already dead print sector. I’d suggest listening to your professors, and thinking more about how bias your sources of information are. Just google these subjects, and look for unbiased reviews of hard data, and you’ll see how, and why print media is dying. I’d start with researching why they are intending to cut back US mail delivery by another day a week, and hard numbers on print versus screen publications. And also, listen to your professors, they are called that for a reason.