Kent State recently spent 21 million dollars to update and expand the facilities of its School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Director Jeff Fruit likes to give tours.
SOUND: TOUR OF KSU J-SCHOOL: The School moved in here in the Spring of '08…this is one of our typical classrooms… UP & UNDER
Interest in journalism careers seems to be high across the country, with enrollments setting records at some schools like Indiana University and Columbia in New York. But, it leaves educators Jeff Fruit faced with a double whammy. He's charged with growing a new crop of journalists in a time when news organizations are dramatically downsizing and going through radical transformations. No one really knows what journalism jobs will look like by the time today's freshman graduates.
JEFF FRUIT: Let me make this real clear --- students are still very enthusiastic about journalism and media-related careers. Now, the moms and dads are asking us some very pointed questions of "Gee, are there going to be jobs here or not?" And we're saying yeah, there are. They're going to be different kinds of careers.
We're already seeing it --- the "Mojo", for example. That's shorthand for "mobile journalist" --- a reporter who arrives at a news event armed with a digital camera, an mp3 sound recorder and a wireless laptop, ready to record, produce and transmit directly from the scene. "No problem", say journalists-in-training like Kristine Gill, a KSU junior who is interning at the Columbus Dispatch, this summer.
KRISTINE GILL: I don't have any second thoughts. Journalism itself isn't dying. Maybe the industry is suffering, and the way we're going to deliver news is going to change.
Another sign of change, to be evident this fall at Kent State, is integration of the staffs of the campus newspaper, cable TV station, and an audio service called Black Squirrel Radio. Retooling newsrooms also means accepting, if not embracing, new technology that is democratizing the experience of journalism. It's a "new media" world: where breaking news can show up from anyone, anywhere --- camera-phone videos of street protests in Iran, for example; where anyone can publish as an online blogger; where many younger adults get most of their news through online social networking. Kent journalism instructor Susan Zake says the relationship between reporter and audience has moved to a radically new phase.
SUSAN ZAKE: I think the expectations of our audiences have shifted greatly. They expect to have a conversation with us as journalists and to have input into that conversation. And before, the way we delivered the news was: we decided exactly what they were going to get, what we were going to cover, and how we would present that. And it was pretty much in one way.
Like many her age, Miami University J-School graduate and WCPN intern Ida Lieszkovszky is comfortable with that. She's always using Twitter and other social media to find story ideas and tips on people to talk to. And, unlike some older reporters, she has no fears that journalism is dying.
IDA LIESZKOVSZKY: The world of journalism has always had a tendency to be gloom and doom. We go for the stories that are sad, right? And it sort of infiltrates the way that we think. And so, when we hear that newspapers are being shutdown and people are losing their jobs, we have this tendency to think it’s kind of like a sinking ship and we’re the rats who are fleeing and running away to get a job in PR or whatever. But, people will always need to hear the news.
And that's one reason why Lieszkovszky remains optimistic about her own future. And one thing going for younger journalists --- they usually come cheaper than those of us who've been around for awhile.
