A smart post by Josh Benton over at the Nieman Journalism Lab critiquing a young journalist (also named Josh) who wondered when the Baby Boomers would relinquish control of the news industry so the next generation can take over:
Josh’s problem is that he still thinks the news business is like baseball, when it’s a lot more like the tech world now. The barriers to entry have tumbled; some of the most popular news sources online didn’t exist two years ago. Things that used to be an advantage — like huge investments sunk in things like printing presses and buildings and circulation departments — are now an albatross. Three smart guys can draw a bigger and more engaged audience than a newsroom of hundreds.
I agree with Benton — as I’ve said previously, I think the most important thing young journalists should be learning right now is how to apply their journalistic skills in areas other than traditional journalism. But this recommendation is not exclusive to journalists.
I’m currently reading Liar’s Poker, and I was struck by a passage early in the book where Michael Lewis describes his logic as he decided on a career after college:
Nevertheless, Wall Street seemed very much like the place to be at the time. The world didn’t need another lawyer, I hadn’t the ability to become a doctor, and my idea for starting a business making little satchels to hang off the rear ends of dogs to prevent them from crapping on the streets of Manhattan (advertising jingle: “We Stop the Plot”) never found funding.
The twin ironies are that Lewis apparently wasn’t even considering the career he eventually pursued, and that career ended up being journalism. Still, the belief that there are a limited number of career choices is a common one among young people (and a lot of older people, too). But it wasn’t true when Lewis graduated back in the ’80s, and it’s even less true now. That fact is driven home to me nearly every day when I show up to work at a job that didn’t even exist when I graduated college.
Or, to think of it another way, there are many jobs, but they all revolve around some combination of a few core skills: Sales. Analysis. Communications. Managing projects. Managing people. When I say that j-schools should be training their grads to be something other than journalists, I mean that they should be helping them to develop core skills and then showing them how to apply those skills to lots of different professions. A good journalist can communicate effectively, manage complex projects (putting out a paper on deadline) as well as people (interviewing difficult subjects). Those are valuable skills; why should someone who possess them limit herself to writing for newspapers or editing magazines?
