Journalism's Place in the 21st Century.

Being a student of journalism and learning about all the future opportunities and stories to cover through this course, I have decided to write (err, type) what I believe my job will entail as we move into the future.

My future job? Virtually non-existent. At least that is how it has been explained to me. The internet is playing a major role in this, especially with the dying off of old forms of print, and the rise of internet based news coverage. My future may seem bleak right now, but I believe more opportunities are in fact going to open because of the internet, even if that means less of a traditional role in journalism.

Online news has been said to be the future of journalism. This is most likely because it already is, and that companies are trying to capitalize on being able to inform people 24/7 on thousands of topics.

Google allows me to search for results on a specific news event and come up with hundreds or thousands of results. These results are not only stories, but videos, Twitter feeds, blogs, pictures, and Facebook pages. My journalism classes have taught me that I must master all of these forms in order to stay competitive in the job market, and they even encourage me to become familiar with them now. I have a Twitter now, a Facebook profile, and now a blog. These are just tiny stones in the long road of mastering these forms of digital media, but they are something that I must continue to work on. My Twitter is still somewhat of a ghost town, mostly because I sometimes forget that I actually have an account, and the majority of the other Twitter accounts that I follow are professional news agencies like the NYT, BBC, and Al-Jazeera among others.

Becoming digitally aware in the 21st century is extremely important. I use this term "digitally aware" because not only must someone learn to use it, but learn to use it to its full potential. Because information can be so easily searched, thanks to Google, journalists must learn to build a following, and make sure their information is within the first page of a Google search result. How can you do this? Link to everything. To become an online journalism star your information must be linked to many pages in order for its popularity to increase. Being linked to large news organizations is one major step, but another one is having your information linked to other forms of media. Having your Twitter page linked to your Facebook increases its search ability, and having your Facebook linked to your blog increases your blog presence on the Web.

These are just a couple of things my professors and instructors have been teaching me about becoming a journalist. At first I was ignorant at the fact that this was vital to our future, and once I became more and more aware, I began to open up and break into the world of Twitter (which will hopefully be more active soon) and continue on blogging even after this class is over.