Anyone can be a good journalist. Anyone can write something up and post it on a blog, tweet it on Twitter, or print it in a newspaper. That’s the easy part; the part that can be completed in a few minutes. The hard part is taking a good journalist and transforming them into a great journalist, a feat I learned at the 2011 Washington Journalism and Media Conference.
The conference, a week-long event, focused on making us more than just journalists, but also leaders in our respective communities; people that could take any challenge and make it into something worthwhile. Along the way, we learned what the job of a journalist is, how to properly network (no not messing around on Facebook), to make our work “bulletproof,” and how to brand ourselves to get noticed and achieve success.
The education was extraordinary, but what really set it apart was that these techniques weren’t taught to us by ordinary professors. Journalists from across the nation, such as TODAY CO-host Hoda Kotb, White House Correspondents Chuck Todd and Jessica Yellin, C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb, and Sari Horwitz and Scott Higham, the writers from The Washington Post that worked on the Chandra Levy case, taught us these things. These are people that have been out in the field and learned firsthand what it takes to be a journalist in today’s society, instead of just learning about it in a classroom.
Even a handful of the best journalists in America can’t teach everything though. Sometimes it has to be experienced. Our events, such as visits to the Newseum and National Press Club, being in the studio audience for the live taping of Washington Journal on C-SPAN, and just blogging about our experiences, all allowed us to be involved and explore the different types of journalism.
I learned a lot during the Washington Journalism and Media Conference, but the thing that really stood out to me was what almost every speaker told us, and believed in throughly. They told us that journalism is alive and well, and won’t be going away anytime soon. Print newspapers may be dying and workers may be getting laid off, but at the same time, thousands of other jobs are popping up. The internet and social networking have launched journalism into a new era, an era that is only just beginning. There’s so much potential to work with and new areas to explore that it could take years just to figure out what we can really do with journalism now, and that’s exciting.
Anyone can be a good journalist, but once you figure out how to go from good to great, you’ll be a journalist that’s ready for what the future of journalism holds. It’s not easy, but it’s definitely worth it.
