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.