I don't remember a world without television or what it's like to hear words or see color on television for the first time, but my grandmother does. I barely remember when computers became smaller than a room or when we became dependent on the internet, but my parents do, because they look back at the "good-ol'-days" when they used type writers to write their term papers and complain about how confusing these darn computers are. These "good-ol'-day" memories get lumped into the "walking to school up hill in the snow" stories bearing one common theme: change.
Eventually everything we know now will be a faded memory. We will laugh about the predictions we made for the future, because we won't be able to fathom how far off we were or how far we've come. If we could predict the future then those visions would become the present and we would be very wealthy people. In journalism, the future is tomorrow and we have no idea what will become of this profession.
Like journalism, editors and writers aren't going anywhere. I say that with my fingers crossed behind my back.
Radio, print, television and the internet are here to stay, but things are going to change. There will be fewer employees at radio and television stations, but marketers, writers and editors will still have jobs, because they can work from the invisible internet newsroom. There will always be news to report and people to oversee the process. Marketers will have their hands full convincing people that this news site is better than the next, because my generation won't waste our time on useless information.
Farhad Manjoo's article "All the news stuff that's fit to print" proves that my generation isn't picking up traditional newspapers, but instead watching the satiric "The Daily Show" or checking out newspapers and magazines that target young people and their interests. But what are we interested in? We can name all the actors on Friends and their characters' names, but we probably can't name two Supreme Court justices even though the two most recent additions have been in the news for months. We are more concerned with Hollywood then the economy or politics. This makes me wonder if the "news" really is dumbed-down for my generation.
A recent study by American Institutes for Research points toward this assumption. It concludes that "more than 75 percent of students at 2-year colleges and more than 50 percent of students at 4-year colleges do not score at the proficient level of literacy. This means that they lack the skills to perform complex literacy tasks, such as comparing credit card offers with different interest rates or summarizing the arguments of newspaper editorials."
So the future of journalism is even more distorted. Are these illiterate graduates supplying me with news in the future? Gosh, I hope not. But what about my children's children? If these trends continue will newspapers vanish into the woodwork or will wireless be a thing of the past? Doubtful, but, journalism is going down the path of uncertainty and taking us along for the ride.
Leave a comment