Response to "Screw AP Style!"

I never thought that I would get so many comments to a post that was just me expressing how I’d been feeling for the past year.  I’d like to highlight a few things:

“I would only stick with journalism if you’re willing to reinvent it and be a part of the future. If the only thing you ever wanted to do was work for an existing media company, I’d run far, far away from journalism.”

“Or will they bridge the gap to create a new journalism that officially breaks with profiteering, bankrupt corporate owners to create a hyper-local, hyper-effective journalism controlled by and focused on our community concerns?”

“Yep, you’re not cut out for it. I’d recommend policy work or charity stuff, with the warning that you’re likely to find there too that tangible impact on the world is hard to come by.”

Is my heart in it? At this point, I don’t think so. Am I cut out for it? Of course I am.

I have been thinking alot about being apart of such a Journalism Renaissance that would completly revolutionize journalism as we know it today. I have been getting encouragement and several discouragements from people about the feild in general but I WANT to be a part of it. I WANT to be a part of change. To re-create the art of storytelling and essentially change journalism from mere reportage to a tool used to make a change. To use my “creative energy to plan awesome marketing campaigns/web sites” as well as to keep people in the know. Awareness vs. just information. It may sound corny but, I want to spark a nerve to make people want to come from behind the television, come from behind the newspapers and the computer screens and begin to “change the world.”

Can I do it? YES. Will I have opposition and adversity? Of course…the best can’t live without haters.

WHAT?!

Ok, so I turn on CNN when I get home from class tonight and I watched a little bit about the Ill. Senator and some stuff about Barak Obama but what three me off guard was this:

What irritates me is not that they are featuring the white house and it’s builders but the fact that it took an African-American president in order for it to be a story. We knew years ago that the white house had been built by slaves, right? When I heard the headline I immediately lowered my head. Why? Because it seems like they are trying to please Black people. We’re already happy, we finally got a president that was worth the hours and hours out of our day that we spent standing in line at the voting polls and he just so happens to be Black. You don’t need to tell us that our people were FORCED to build the WHITE House for the lst 43 WHITE presidents. Does anybody else see anything wrong with this?

Screw AP style!

Why I don’t want to be a journalist anymore:

As I sat through most of my classes this semester, I realized the overrated-ness (if you will) of journalism. Journalist can be very ruthless, not caring about where their next story comes from – as long as it comes. I spent four years of my life studying to become a journalist, which means I sat in classes learning about the history of journalism, the technology boom, and how the news is shifting from newspapers to the Internet. I also spent a lot of time learning about the importance of “newsworthy-ness” only to realize that the only time I ever sit down and watch the news is when I’m bored, then EVERYTHING becomes newsworthy.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m in the wrong field, but I really don’t care that much. It’s too much for too little. According to payscale.com the average salary for a journalist with little to no experience is 31,000 dollars a year. Great. Just enough to feed my dog. The average salary for someone with 20+ years is a little under 50,000 a year. I’d probably be richer in college.

It’s not worth it. I’d rather write a plan to help eliminate homelessness in Baltimore rather than write an article exploiting them and not helping. Long story short, they make it seem like we’re a necessity in their world, but people choose what they want to hear anyway. It doesn’t take the blood sweat and tears that we put into the work in order for people to read it.

5 of my friends began their college careers as eager journalists. 5 of my friends are now either in a different field or no longer eager about being a journalist but eager to graduate. My choice is to go back and get another degree in Graphic Design – something that results in product that highlights as opposed to false light.