A New Year, a New Outlook

Today's class discussions - in all three journalism courses I teach at Miami University of Ohio - are about news media trends.
It's a hard lesson, both for me and for students.
The fun part for students was doing their own news media surveys of family, friends and fellow students. How often do you seek out community news? U.S. news? World news? Where do you go to find it? Do you usually read a story to the end, or just the headline, or just look at the photos or video?

It's a great discussion to have with young people. Some were shocked by how little some classmates know or care about news these days. Some were surprised at how much family members - even younger siblings - stick with newspaper reading, or the nightly network news broadcast.

But then comes the hard part: Looking through the annual "State of the News Media" report from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism.
A sobering moment, even when I emphasize that studies show demand for 24/7 news is growing, but that the business model to support that newsgathering is on life support.

It's a hard lesson for me, too. After 30 years of calling myself a "journalist" (since I was a teen, editing the Echo student newspaper at Webster Groves High School in St. Louis), I often today marvel at what that term means.
How many times can you say to a young person: "Well, 30 (or 20, or 10) years ago, journalists blah blah blah..." Many get their "news" from Jon Stewart, or Colbert.

I was struck yesterday by Technorati's annual "State of the Blogosphere," so similar to Pew's "State of the News Media." Three out of every four bloggers today is a "hobbiest," the study found. Three quarters are college grads. Two of out every three are male (where are all of us chatty women? Facebook?).

I haven't had much time to do real journalism in the past year because of my teaching and web design load. The conservative Cincinnati columnist Peter Bronson was just named editor of the magazine I previously had written boatloads of business articles for. I won't be working for Cincy again.

But I HAVE blogged. Blogged during my 2009 summer in Italy often, and loved it, and always reported and wrote like a journalist. Technorati's studies show that a large chunk of bloggers feel they are doing journalism. So maybe I should feel better about my blog work, and even my Facebook posts of "news," like the Bronson bit, which my Cincinnati media colleagues will buzz about.

But for writing students, I know blogging is a blast. They have fun, they work on their writing, their journalism. And, best of all, they contribute to the global conversation while doing it. Democracy - the Fourth Estate, if you will - at work at Miami University.

Go Redhawk writers!