<p>I was just wondering why anyone would pursue a major in a dying industry like journalism. Newspapers are shutting down. The major broadcasting netowrks (CBS, NBC, ABC) are losing viewers. Magazines are doing bad. So why major in journalism?</p>
<p>I’m going into college for Broadcast journalism, starting my freshman year next week. I think you’re on to something in some ways, and I ask these same questions to myself sometimes. However, I think journalism isn’t dying, but more or less transforming into something different. Sure, newspapers are definitely not as widely read as they used to be, but as of now, television is still one of the top ways to get a message across to people in a fast way.</p>
<p>In my opinion, I believe that news will be online more, with videos of news stories. There is demand for news to be presented to people, because for one, written stories don’t have the same personality as stories with video or audio. Without the extra qualities of video or audio, a story may seem dry or would not have the same positive attributes otherwise.</p>
<p>So, yes, the current means of acquiring news may be changing, but it will not be going away. People will always need their news. It’s how a community can survive, being knowledgeable about the happenings in their area. People by nature are curious, and so the news really quenches that thirst of information. I don’t know exactly where it’s heading, but it’s heading in a direction that I’m likely to follow.</p>
<p>Summerdude is right. People will always need news. You can go on and on about citizen journalists and bloggers if you want to, but at the end of the day, they don’t have the resources or time to cover news the way people demand it be covered. And they don’t have the training to do it ethically. </p>
<p>Journalism isn’t dying. It’s changing.</p>
<p>how is it dying? i mean, how ELSE would people get their news? journalism is the only way! and news is important… do the math.</p>
<p>Journalism is thriving; it’s just the Old Media that are dying. </p>
<p>When I was college age, we had only 3 sources of news: the daily paper; the 3 broadcast networks who had a half hours of news, once a day; and the 3 weekly newsmagazines. Compare that to today: 4 or 5 channels that have nothing but news 24/7, and online access around the clock to every newspaper and magazine on the globe. Not to mention the news organizations that didn’t exist before the dawn of the internet – from the huffington post to worldnet daily, and everything in between.</p>
<p>The hunger for news and information hasn’t gone away; it has exploded. And someone needs to write all those articles and all that copy. :)</p>
<p>Journalism is not dying, it’s changing. But I think it’s changing in a way where the media will become a less profitable field. It used to be the major news outlets for newspapers, magazines, and television broadcasts. The companies who specialized in this stuff made a lot of money from advertising revenue. They could pay journalists well. </p>
<p>However, now the internet is taking over. News companies can’t make that much money from online advertising revenue just because the internet offers so many more places for companies to advertise (e.g. craigslist) than newspapers, magazines, or TV did. This drives down advertising revenue. Companies can try to put up a pay wall and charge for an online subscription but unless you are the New York Times or Wall Street Journal that would be a terrible idea. I read an article from Britain that after a newspaper there put up an online pay wall, traffic to the website plummeted. </p>
<p>There will be new news sites out there, like the Huffington Post and World Net, but people who write for them get paid little, and they take a lot of articles from AP or other news sources and just post them up there. They are more like forums than news sites. And the 24/7 news channel don’t even have that much news. A lot of the time slots of those channels are filled with talk shows by political pundits. There’s less news and more opinion.</p>
<p>Lol, they are happy with a 6$ an hour job.</p>
<p>^ Lol, I love completely made up facts</p>
<p>Media is always evolving- it always has been and always will be. Thirty years from now we’re not going to be looking at media usage like we do today.</p>
<p>However, people will always need their news ;)</p>