“Is Journalism Dead?”
This was one of the first questions my professor asked my MC2101 class. A class designed to be the introduction to print journalism course started with a question that easily made me debate my career choices.
Or it could have, at least.
What a lot of people don’t know about me is that I began my college career as a digital advertising major. With little to no plan for my future career aspirations, all I knew was that I wanted to create.
I always had doubts about following the digital advertising path, though. I feel like that’s typical for every college freshman at first, because who doesn’t wonder if their major is the right fit for them?
Even with those thoughts, I had no other ideas for what I would do. I spent most of high school worrying about things other than myself, so the college preparation time I had was well wasted by no one but me.
I poured most of my energy into volleyball when I was in high school, but not really as a player. I did play, for just a couple of years, but I was quickly in and out of high school ball. My time spent playing volleyball was quite short, but my appreciation for the sport continued to grow beyond just the game.
As my appreciation grew, I developed a need to learn. I wanted to learn something new about volleyball, but how do you learn something new about a sport that rarely changes?
Short answer: read.
Did you know Nebraska’s beach volleyball team, which usually only consists of just its indoor competitors, scooped up a new addition from the university’s club volleyball team?
How about the back-to-back national champion, who went through two open-heart surgeries and was told it wasn’t safe to play anymore? The former Texas Longhorn then went on to become the first overall pick in the Pro Volleyball League’s first-ever draft.
One of my personal favorites is the story of Indiana volleyball’s setter and homegrown star. She committed to the program’s potential at 13 years old, and now she’s helping lead a historic turnaround while cementing her name in the record books.
There’s something different about being a fan of a team and being a fan of a sport. My way of being a fan of volleyball is shown through my genuine curiosity about who these athletes are. What are their stories? How did they get to where they are? Why do they do what they do?
And thus, my liking toward writing and my interest in volleyball found a reason to cross paths.
So, I eventually realized digital advertising wasn’t for me and switched to journalism. In the Manship School of Mass Communication, the journalism path is divided into two: print and broadcast. I chose print.
While we continue to evolve into a digital generation consumed by short-form video, physical newspapers are being forgotten and the field of print seems to be going down with it. In some eyes.
But I’ll still write. Even if no one wants to spare the three or four minutes it takes to read an article online. I’ll still write. Some teams play in empty stadiums, day after day. But they still play. So I’ll still write.
Newspaper journalism can dissolve and people can question my future career, but I’ll still write. As long as I continue to find what my professor describes as “ordinary people with extraordinary stories,” I’ll still write.
I’ll still write, so someone else can share their story.
When my professor asked my class if journalism was dead, he asked us to write a response, sharing why we chose journalism.
The last sentence of my piece serves as a reminder to myself of why I started this whole thing in the first place:
“The passion for Richmond is there, and one day, the career will be too.”