The truth of the matter is, the fact that I’ve given up on journalism has a lot to do with me as a person. As a man of numerous flaws who is occasionally subject to anti-social behaviour, giving up on a field where I regularly would have to deal with people sounds like a no-brainer. That aside, there is something I’d like to articulate in what may as well be the final article I write—I think journalism as we know it, is truly dead.
I got into journalism because I loved learning about the world. By Grade 6, I could tell you the capital of every country, and by Grade 11, I started a small YouTube channel where I would try to talk daily about an obscure event that happened somewhere in the world that didn’t make front page headlines. I did this until about Grade 12. Doing this gave me a view of the world that would seem, to most, cynical, but which I came to believe was realistic.
In Grade 12, I was part of a program in which I got to work in the television industry a bit, through local studios. This is where I really started to see that journalism really was dying.
In one studio I worked in, the atmosphere seemed to be of depression and defeat. Most of the people had been replaced by machines, and shortly after I left, the entire thing shut down for good. The second studio I visited was much more prominent and less gloomy—but still, similar stories abounded of machines replacing the human workforce, and increasing budget cuts were also an ongoing theme. Something that I heard quite often was, “We used to have a guy dedicated to this, now a machine does it.”
My experience with the legacy media, and later just the culture of the university, has dissuaded me in a serious way from pursuing communications or journalism as a degree. Like I said, most would consider my mindset to be cynical, but I think many other people are just naïve. I’ve found that a lot of the rhetoric in the courses I’ve taken just reinforces students’ assumptions about the world.
For instance, a history professor of mine, word for word, said, “I’m trying to teach you guys history so that you don’t become Nazis.” Okay, then we’re not learning history, are we? We’re learning your de-Nazified version of history. But I’m not a professor. I’ve read a lot about history—I’ll fight with people about it, but I’m no qualified professional. In my unprofessional opinion, there’s a lot of stuff in university courses that they don’t tell you and that you aren’t going to learn.
But that’s my unprofessional opinion—take from it what you will.
What it does say to me is that there may be people graduating with communications degrees or journalism degrees that have a one-sided view of how the world works.
The future of journalism is online, not in the automated and money-leaking legacy media. So what’s online? The thought of one day working for Buzzfeed makes me sick. Pick any online site and most of the time you get biased stuff catered to one form of audience, whether it’s Breitbart or Jezebel.
Is that journalism? Not really.
Maybe VICE News was interesting, but it looks like there have been budget cuts and they’ve been doing less sending journalists to investigate foreign correspondence on the Ukrainian war, and more generic “Donald Trump is bad” articles. The result—I’m going into a trade. Whether this is going to be good or bad for me, I don’t know. But with the current political and industrial climate, anything seems preferable to journalism.
