A Last Hurrah at Merrill College
When I first knew I wanted to be a journalist when I was a little girl, I thought I would want to work for a newspaper. Before tablets, smartphones and popular news sites, I would pester my parents to subscribe to both local English newspapers in the United Arab Emirates: where I grew up.
But a lot has changed since then.
Our generation has been thrust right into the middle of digital and traditional. The New York Times or ProPublica? The Washington Post or BuzzFeed?
The duality of news mediums has created a dilemma for us millennials. Do we strive to preserve tradition or move forward? The way I see it is, why move backward when you can move forward?
Throughout my job hunt, I didn’t limit my search to strictly digital outlets. I sent out snail mail packets to the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, but I also sent out applications where I attached my own GIF (BuzzFeed, of course).
And throughout my extensive hunt, I noticed publications were getting back to me about social media positions, website producing positions and everything digital, which speaks loudly in itself.
I’m not a coding genius or have 1,000 followers on Twitter, but publications expect a certain level of digital dexterity from us budding journalists. And in return, that’s what we should expect from publications as we go into our first jobs. They’re likely to rely on us to run social media platforms, work on the website or help with the transition to the web.
As a result, we should embrace those expectations. We may not be writing long form narratives like we had hoped to when we were young, because every publication is trying to innovate. And they’re using us to help them.
That’s why I wasn’t upset at the dozen rejection letters I got from traditional publications, especially after sifting through the leaked New York Times “Innovations” report. Instead, I got hired by what the report listed as a competitor, Quartz, a strictly mobile global business publication as part of the Atlantic Media fellowship, where my experiences and skills will be used to their full potential.
Although the job search was tedious and unbearable at times, the important part was selling the digital skills we learned through our classes and internships. And it’s important to remember that we are still journalists. We still tell stories. It’s just the platforms that are changing. It went from ancient scriptures to Paul revere, telegraphs to newspapers, television and now the web and smartphones.
So let’s get out there and do our jobs as journalists, while adapting and moving forward.
Zainab Mudallal was a columnist for PovichCenter.org during the 2013-2014 school year.
