Rumor has it that the journalism industry is going straight down
the toilet.
If that were true, it wouldn’t bode very well for my
future, given that I have spent my college career at UCLA working
50- and 60-hour weeks at the Daily Bruin instead of cultivating the
perfect grade point average and sucking up to professors to get a
glowing letter of recommendation.
It seems like every other week a new study comes out trying to
hammer home the message that young people just don’t read
newspapers like they used to. (Or vote, for that matter ““
we’re a disappointing demographic.)
Newspaper circulation and advertising revenue is not what it
used to be. That includes the Daily Bruin.
Many of you who do pick up The Bruin regularly are just tearing
out the crossword puzzle or the Sudoku and throwing the rest of the
paper on the floor of your lecture hall. Don’t think I
don’t see you ““ I blame you for the fact that my Daily
Bruin stipend evens out to something like $2 an hour, and
it’s an exciting week in my apartment when I can afford
meat.
But I’m just as guilty. I’m a journalism junkie. I
follow media law cases and have a nerd-crush on the Los Angeles
Times’ car columnist ““ and even I canceled my print
subscription to The Times.
Granted, the decision took careful consideration ““ of the
growing pile of unread issues in the corner of my dining room and
the looks I was getting from my roommates.
It would be wrong to say that I wasn’t getting my daily
dose of news. I was reading most of the print edition when it went
online the night before. If I even took the print edition out of
its bag, admittedly it was to do the Sudoku while I ate my morning
English muffin.
It’s true that young people don’t read newspapers
like we used to. We aren’t dedicated readers and daily print
subscribers. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t still
getting the news.
We get RSS feeds of our favorite blogs. We have National Public
Radio podcasts on our iPods. We’re reading The New York
Times, but it’s on a BlackBerry instead of with our morning
coffee. And Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert aren’t our only
sources of news, though we do like them.
If UCLA students are any indication, we aren’t exactly the
uniformed and uninterested age group we’re made out to
be.
For every Facebook campaign issue like “Abolish
crocs” or “Christopher Walken for president,”
there are a dozen groups in support of candidates and ballot
measures or calling attention to real issues students are
passionate about.
We care about Darfur, affirmative action and gay marriage. We
care about the war on terror ““ we’re the demographic
that’s fighting it. We care about student fees, and we care
about what our political leaders say and do, from the university to
national level and everywhere in between.
Every time you turn around, there’s a new movement on
campus for an issue you didn’t even know existed. With the
upcoming midterm elections, campus will morph into a microcosm of
political activism.
The decline of traditional newspaper readership isn’t
exactly the awareness epidemic it’s portrayed to be. The
media isn’t going anywhere ““ we’re just taking on
new forms of information dissemination. Journalists aren’t an
endangered species. We’re merely an evolving one.
Dudley is the 2006-2007 managing editor. She’s only
slightly embarrassed that the first news source she checks in the
morning is Defamer.