Photo by Jennifer L. Johnson. Georgia State University journalism instructor Matt J. Duffy encourages his students to pursue careers in journalism despite the floundering economy.
by Jennifer L. Johnson
Matt J. Duffy’s Facebook statuses often make him feel like he’s courtside in a short skirt, waving pompoms.
“I try to cheer up my students and reporter friends and let them know that they aren’t wasting their time with journalism,” Duffy said.
Duffy teaches communication law and media writing at Georgia State University, using stories from his years in the newsrooms of the Boston Herald and The Marietta Daily Journal to teach students about what it’s like to be a reporter.
“As far as writing, though, that’s it for me,” Duffy said. “I’d rather been in a classroom, stressing to students that they’re learning the skills here that can apply to any form that newspapers will eventually take.”
As the industry treads further into uncertain waters, reporters are starting to choose classrooms and bookstores over newsrooms. Even though enrollment at accredited journalism programs across the country has yet to decline, would-be reporters are asking questions about the future of the print media field, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.
“I tell every student the need for written-word journalists will never go away,” Duffy said. “People are always going to need written news. Not everyone is going to watch video news.”
The success of future journalists depends on their educational foundations, according to Duffy. Writing good news leads, debating ethics, and learning communication law and history are important to Duffy.
“The answer to whether or not journalists will exist tomorrow is all about keeping a check on the powerful,” Duffy said. “Journalism today will go away. It’s what it becomes next that is the issue.”
It’s an issue that Sara Player has been thinking a lot about recently. She’s a 23-year-old senior in Duffy’s media writing class, and often stays after lectures to hear more stories about covering Boston in the late ’90s.
“He’ll talk about popping in and out of the newsroom all day and calling in stories from the field,” Player said. “I keep thinking that, that won’t ever be me—that the newspaper will be dead before I get the chance.”
Though her journalism instructors assure her that newspapers will continue to exist, Player looked into transferring to the English program at GSU even though she’s a semester away from graduation.
“I have such anxiety about it,” Player said. “I feel like I need to have another option, but I really don’t want to do anything but this.”
Player plans on finishing her journalism degree and said she hopes there will be careers for journalists once she gets out of graduate school.
Winterville, Ga., resident Donny Bailey Seagraves didn't believe that journalists could make their reporting a viable career. That's why Seagraves left the Grady School of Journalism before getting her undergraduate at UGA.
"I love journalism, but I actually left before I graduated," said Seagraves. "We were in a downturn and I didn't think that I could make a living doing it."
Seagraves had several other jobs though continued to write for newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and the Athens Daily News. She still writes for Athens Magazine when she's not doing publicity for her new book.
Her children’s young adult book, Gone From These Woods, was published in August by Random House’s Delacorte Press. Seagraves has written nine books, but this is the first she’s had published.
Cathy Cobbs, Managing Editor of the Dunwoody Crier, spoke to a college journalism class last month and was surprised to learn that only one out of the thirty students reads a daily newspaper.
“Every time I hear about a magazine going under or a newspaper dying, it makes me sick,” Cobbs said.
Seagraves agrees.
"It's almost like loosing an old friend," she said. "I'm sad to see newspapers dying.”
Duffy doesn’t think that will ever happen.
“I’m going to be reading my students’ writing when I’m in my nineties,” Duffy said. “I might be reading it on a book reader-screen thing, but it will be there, and so will their jobs.”
Edited by Lauren Costley
Photo by Jennifer L. Johnson Author Donny Bailey Seagraves celebrates the August release of her middle grade childrens' book, Gone From These Woods, with a cake depicting its front-cover.
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