College Reporters & Broadcasters Put In The Work & Time, As Many Do Not Know What Lies Ahead in the Industry
A Special Opinion for Journalism majors in the Class of 2024 & 2025
Graduation season is just around the corner, and for the Class of 2024, especially to those that are in college, they will be entering into a vastly changing yet vastly wild work scene in, what experts call, the third industrial revolution. It’s more technological, more toxic if you’re in the wrong work environment, and more expansive than ever before.
There are more options and with the looming threat of student loan debt coming near, college graduates need to understand that saving money and finding a productive workforce that won’t judge your appearance (which is hard to do) can be possible.
I have learned through the years of being a student, you can be lectured all you want, know all you want, or study all you can, but at the end of the day no one is guaranteed anything. Not money, time, or even a job.
It’s a cruel world the Class of 2024 will be entering in, and the same goes going for a broadcasting or journalism major. You could be the Peabody Award winner of a major university newspaper, and you will realize that working at a desk, on deadlines, and with kids and bills to pay is nowhere near fun. It’s stressful.
Your job might not even be around long unless the workplace switches to an all-digital press or conversational debate journalism style, but you have no control over what the boss does, so my tid bit of advice to college students is be aware of the job you’re entering even if it won’t last long which is becoming ever more true for journalism majors like myself, but there are ways to get around this and live comfortable without being tight on meetings before sporting events and long nights writing on deadline.
Print journalism and some digital are falling by the way side as technology so rapidly expands in this “tech, self-worth” society we live in today, and yet is important to be aware of your surroundings while you’re figuring out how to save for your 401k and retirement benefits.
According to The Hill, 1,808 print, digital, and news journalism jobs were cut in 2022 alone, which is up by 20 percent compared to years before including 1,511 jobs that were cut in 2021, making this leap an all-time high for journalism jobs around the United States and it’s future at risk.
The average pay for a journalist is $44,151, a TV producer gets $74,445 on average, and this could pay between $40,000-$100,000 if successful, but if you work for Good Morning America or even the Today Show, your salary could be in the millions varying on contract, but less than 5% of people get to have a job in that part of the industry, which makes you very lucky to even stay at the job for 30 years or longer.
That leads me to my next point, overall treatment by staff and workers are getting more toxic than ever.
You will deal with meetings, events, and attend city or county government confrences, but let me tell you, long term the broadcasting and journalism industry is very toxic, and might ruin your health unless you are that yourself. This year, I finally made the choice, after being so sick and terminally ill twice, to end my time as a college journalist, knowing the vast array of jobs at my disposal because all jobs care about is the education you have and the connections you breed. I ended my time because I realized one thing.
The world is a selfish place and no one cares about poverty or what you’ve gone through. I got sick because I thought too much about work, and I learned that the high school mentality of praise and recognition does not work in the real world, everyone goes through something and how you channel that anger, frustration and impatience is not by yelling at all of your customers, it’s about being patient and compassionate even during hard times.
It's important to note that in journalism, if you’re not meant to be the prize of your company, accept you might not be the greatest character in the movie, but you’re the outcast, the villain at times, and things will not work out sometimes the way you want them to and that is a tragic factor of life. As Joe Buck, the famed sports commentator for ESPN and FOX Sports, and former IU graduate said on the Sports Illustrated Sports Media Podcast in a podcast episode last year, “This industry will chew you up and spit you out faster than you could ever imagine.”
That is never truer with people like me, because when one door opens the boss will shut up, then open it, then shut it, and do it again and again. At the end of the day, the industry might not be what everybody thinks it will be, which leads me to my last point, what to do whenever your industry dumps you and you are out of a job or need to pay bills… there are so many options.
I used to use Newsbreak, but now work on here and Fiverr to write stories and keep voiceover work, digital print, photography, newsletter, media, and journalism features alive, I’m even looking for Fiverr work if you want to check my page (not trying to play myself up, but anyway), Fiverr is a great site and when you’re new to it, it will take time to have a good project come to you. Newsbreak allowed me to have over 2,000 followers in less than 3 months since starting in January 2023.
Also, as basic as this sounds, start a YouTube channel and keep posting every week to keep your audience fresh and tasteful to what you’re doing both in your work and in your free time.
You are in the right place to write newsletters like me, write articles for Newsbreak, and or you can start a blog or video series as the jobs are available in a vast of ways, and that is thanks to the remote work industry, but as many understand, finding a job should be your opinion but you should also keep tabs with broadcasting experts who are reporting about changes in social media forums and even in textbooks every day.
So in all of this, I wish the Class of 2024 the best of luck in their journeys to prosper and light, and may you celebrate this momentous occasion of graduating from school and I hope you can live a wonderful yet not-so-easy life, all in all, welcome to the adult world ladies and gentleman, and for high school kids, welcome to college as I look forward to hearing about your training and developing your own version of the American dream.