Final Assignment

I enrolled in Journalism 101 because I harbored a fledgling interest in majoring in the field. I wanted to take this course to fully explore my options should I proceed with that ambition. Coming in, people told me that I was reasonably talented writer and public speaker, so I wanted to pay particular attention to broadcast fields like radio and television. Those chapters were indeed interesting, but other sections caught my eye as well. I've always had a great appreciation for film and literature, so the prospect of working in the movie industry or writing books is one that has my attention. Additionally, I spend a great deal of time on the Internet; even more so this semester while maintaining two blogs. In this generation where everything is converging into cyberspace, I feel like it would be smart to study some kind of web-journalism at the very least as a supplement to whatever discipline I choose.

As enticing as many of these chapters were, they also spoke of change, and the guest speakers who came into class also talked about how different there professions were now in contrast to how they were when they first started. Books are moving out of print, movies are digitizing everything from production to distribution format, radio is transitioning to satellite, and informative journalism is finding it harder and harder to survive without the web. I have certain misgiving about entering an industry like mass communication where so many structures are in flux. P.J. O'Rourke says that journalism is dead. Why then would I want to study it at all? Clearly it is only dead as we know it, but that unknown is what keeps my fledgling interest from learning how to fly.

I think if I decide to continue on a path through J-School, I will probably stick with my gut and declare for the Broadcast sequence. However, I will be paying constant attention to what is changing and what I need to learn to adapt to that change. I feel that will be the only way any of us can make it in the long run.