Journalism Student? Start Your Own Company

New York: As newspapers shut down, media outlets consolidate and social networking platforms become the primary source of news, journalism students must look beyond traditional print or TV jobs and aim to become entrepreneurs to start their own ventures like websites or PR firms, reveals a significant study.

The study from Rice University and Rutgers University found that educators are encouraging aspiring journalists to look for work outside the news business. “They’re telling their students that they don’t have to, in fact shouldn’t, go work for traditional news organizations — they can do temporary, contract or freelance work, or work for non-news corporations, the government, NGOs (non-governmental organizations) or almost any other place,” said Max Besbris, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University.

“For a long time, journalism had been trying to cultivate the difference between journalism and PR (public relations), so it was really interesting to see this change in thinking, and hear individuals say that students should prepare to work as journalists in non-news organizations,” he added in a paper set to be published in the journal of Social Forces. Now, papers are shutting down, news outlets are consolidating and information is widely available on the Internet. “We wanted to see how these drastic changes in media and media consumption over the past 20 years were impacting journalism education,” Besbris noted. For the study, Besbris and Caitlin Petre, an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers, conducted in-depth interviews with 113 faculty, staff and administrators from 44 US journalism programmes. The authors argued that journalism schools have sought to reframe the industry’s unstable labour market as an inevitable and even desirable part of the business and its professional identity. (IANS)

Also Read: Google News to fund new ideas for quality journalism