Journalism is like Betty White; you figure it should’ve been dead for years, but every time you check up on it, it’s doing better than ever. For years I’ve heard people try to make the argument that journalism is a dying field because people don’t read newspapers anymore and the media is lying to us. Say what you want, but journalism is alive and well, just like Ms. White.
Testing the vital signs of journalism is tough for two reasons. One, it doesn’t have a pulse to read, and two, it’s constantly changing. I think the most important thing to understand about journalism today is that it comes in more forms than you can think of. When you hear the word journalism, your mind more than likely brings you to a magazine article, a story in the newspaper or the evening news broadcast. Sure, maybe that’s all journalism used to be 60 years ago, but this is 2017, people. We have this crazy thing called the internet and smartphones that allow anyone from anywhere to be a journalist.
The rise of social media saved journalism from being something you needed a degree to pursue to something where you only needed a thumb and a general sense of how to use a cell phone. In the past five years alone, citizen journalism has changed the game. Blogs, tweets, memes and that Worldstar video you saw yesterday of middle schoolers fighting, are all journalism.
Citizen journalism has changed the way contemporary journalism outlets conduct work. Since an individual’s information on Twitter is public, news broadcasters will often use tweets or videos to show eyewitness reports. The ability for anyone to shoot a video or post on any social media platform has brought light to serious issues such as police and government brutality, as well as given the world memes and cute dog pictures.
Journalism isn’t dying. If anything, journalism, however broadly you define it, is growing. Sure, the days of picking up a newspaper to read seem to be next to over. In fact, I assume most of you reading this are reading it off a screen.
However, if you’re one of the few people I see around campus reading from a physical copy of The Bona Venture, consider yourself special. So, sure, journalism isn’t exactly what it used to be, but saying it’s dead is, as Donald Trump would say, fake news.
Christian Gravius is a staff writer for The Bona Venture. His email is graviucc15@bonaventure.edu.
