to see that in a lot of ways,” she said. “I’m willing
to meet people where they are.
“What I want to do is still something that people
need,” she said.
With that, she has to cut the conversation short.
Arrowood has a class to attend.
__
If they’re being honest, most journalism
educators have at some point wondered to
themselves: Am I preparing young people for a
dying industry? Even if I try to retool for a modern
age, who will be interested in my school?
At the turn of the century, Syracuse’s S.I.
Newhouse School of Public Communication
routinely welcomed 48 new students each year
into its master’s program in journalism. A few
years ago, that number slipped into the teens, said
Joel Kaplan, who runs the program. Nationally, the
number of undergraduates in college journalism
programs dropped 9 percent between 2013 and
2015, according to the Association for Education
in Journalism & Mass Communication.
Newspaper newsroom jobs across the country
sank from 52,000 in 2008 to 24,000 now,
according to the University of North Carolina.
There’s more to journalism than newspapers,
of course, but the number of jobs in digital,
nonprofit and broadcast newsrooms can’t make
up for that kind of contraction.
Try selling a specialized education at an
expensive private school to prospective
students and parents with those grim statistics
as a backdrop.
“It’s one thing to go into debt if you’re an
engineer or a graphic artist, because you know
the jobs are going to be there,” Kaplan said.