Future of Journalism Careers Debated at Conference

The School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley is hosting a conference on the future of journalism this week; the principal question among all the participants being whether journalism as we have known it will survive at all. The Web has become both an advertising medium and a news resource to such a degree that newspapers are closing across the country, their two basic revenue streams having been destroyed.

While journalism degrees remain a popular choice among undergraduates today, they can no longer assume that an internship and job opportunity are going to be there at the local daily or with a glossy magazine. Craigslist has forever changed the classified ads business, and news aggregators like Google have changed the way in which people access news. There is irony in the fact that the conference is occurring at Google's office park in Mountain View, California.

Many of the participants see a future for journalism in the digital world. The print press - known as the "dead tree media" among young professionals in the business - will probably evolve into a specialty industry. Many professionals working in the business argue that journalism and journalists have a place in the online universe; the debate is over what form it will take.

Several well known press outlets have tried a subscription model online and none have met with success. The key, according to some of the conference participants, is providing news on a targeted basis in the same fashion that Yahoo and Google are able to target their advertising. News delivery needs to be broken into components of relevancy and put on the computer desktops of individuals who have an interest. This concept may mean that a graduate with an IT degree may be as crucial in the newsroom as the writers and editors working there.

Many news outlets have developed news selection software for their content delivery and paired that function with the ad services of Google, Yahoo or MSN. It falls to the professional with an internet marketing degree to determine how best to maximize advertising revenue.

Newspapers will have to find a way to retain regional identity online, so that they remain a news source of choice. It will be interesting to see if the soapbox type media outlets such as Fox will be able to make a subscription model work; while their slash and burn reporting has a loyal following, converting those believers into subscribers may be a formidable challenge.