The Evolving Job Description of a Journalist
At its core, journalism is about serving your community so that the people within it can stay informed, honest, and connected to one another by sharing stories.
During intro-level journalism and media courses, some of the first mantras students will hear is that journalism’s first obligation is to the truth and its first loyalty is to the citizens.
There will (and should) always be job requirements for a journalist that remain constant throughout time: seeking truth, pursuing transparency, and sharing many perspectives. However, just like the business model of journalism needs to keep evolving, so does the way we think about what it means to be a journalist.
Writing daily articles about local politics and chasing breaking news is and always will be a couple of forms of journalistic work, but so is informing your community how to recycle if your apartment complex doesn’t offer it or where to find a polling station in your area for the midterm elections.
Most news consumers have come to expect a wide range of information and topics from the organizations they follow, and therefore from the journalists who work into the wee hours of the night to provide it for them.
This expectation was reaffirmed once my teammate and I in the product development class finished our empathy interviews with people in the Tucson community. Yes, people wanted their usual dose of daily news stories, often ones that were on every mainstream outlet’s front page, but they also wanted to know when local events were happening, how to find the perfect medical care provider, and parenting advice — topics that might not traditionally be categorized as “hard news.”
To serve their communities to the best of their abilities, journalists must be willing to wear many hats. One of the many lessons this product development class has taught me is that those who believe they don’t need to evolve in conjunction with the industry or the changing needs and wants of their consumers will not be the best journalists they have the potential to be — or that their community deserves.
Adapting to our audiences, readers and viewers demands that journalists are the most attentive listeners. After all, journalists don’t enter this profession to become the story themselves, they do it to share the stories of others. This holds true in any role in journalism — whether you are a metro reporter, a designer, or a product developer — or sometimes all three at once.
The School of Journalism’s product development class offers students the opportunity to learn about journalistic practices that aren’t just traditional reporting and writing, and I hope to see even more innovative and digital-first courses here as well as other journalism schools nationwide.
