Who shot journalism?
One of the things that I have always been very proud to say is that I am a journalist. I graduated with my degree in 2013 from a college in western New York. In college, I made lifelong friends, mistakes, falls (both literal and not) there was a time where I knocked over a whole display of chips in the convenience store but I am who I am, so are we really that surprised? The year that I started college, my class became the first class of journalism majors that the university ever saw. Prior to my freshman year of college, journalism was only a minor. What I loved the most about that, though, was that it felt like we were learning alongside our professors while they were figuring out what worked, we were learning the ins and out of newsrooms, interview etiquette, and finding our beats. I always felt like we were on the cusp of the digital journalism changeover, that we were seeing it in real time and it was scary and exciting and unknown.
When I couldn’t find a job after college in the way I naïvely assumed I would, I built my career writing online. I wrote about music, TV, movies, celebrities, and the YouTube stars that wanted to be A listers. Eventually, I began writing profiles and articles that I was really really proud of about disability and pop culture, and the ways in which I, as the consumer of pop culture, feel that it could be better. In my work as a journalist, I have made lifelong friends. I have made so many mistakes, and I have had a few really magnificent wins.
Now though, in our year 2024, after a year spent not being able to get a single journalist gig, and watching as publication after publication I admire shutters due to a lack of funding, I have to ask myself: who shot journalism? This profession that I so deeply love, and found so much of myself through has survived, so much, including a beating by a former president, who, hyper focused on “fake news“ and influenced the American people and the world into thinking that journalism holds no value. And through some fault of its own, journalism has lost the trust of the American people just based off the choices being made, and the ways in which some stories have been told. Journalism has survived the thought that it does not matter, and that anyone can do it. I’m a little biased, of course but I don’t think anyone could do it, not well anyway. Still, I find myself asking the question. can journalism survive this? Can I? You see, I am a realist at heart, and so when I stopped getting writing gigs, I asked myself who am I without journalism? What kind of pivot do I have to make in order to survive? I think those questions are important, and I will likely keep asking them, as I have not found an adequate answer. But I guess one question I want to leave you with is can America survive without it? can the world survive without journalism? I Don’t think so and I am afraid that the more publications we lose the closer we get to that reality. A world without journalism feels like a very dark place that I don’t want to be in. I think that is very dangerous thing we find ourselves on the precipice of. That we can course correct before it’s too late.
Xoxo,
Keah