Pinch Hitting for Journalism in the Ninth

Being a journalist is a lot like playing baseball.

Sometimes it feels like you're up against a powerful team. These days, that team is the American public who are highly skeptical of the credibility of the press. In one popular poll, only one-quarter of people said they believe everything The Wall Street Journal reports -- and that was the highest mark among newspapers. Even public officials occasionally stomp on papers and ignore the press.

On top of that, the weather isn't so great. Newspapers are folding and shrinking at dramatic rates. Denver and Seattle are now one-paper towns, and The Boston Globe, a journalistic heavyweight, nearly shuttered this month.

This makes for a nasty screwball that thousands of journalism graduates, myself included, will be swinging at this summer as we try to justify our education by scrambling for a few entry-level jobs in the field. Our resumes and clips may make some of us talented free agents, but the pool is made more competitive by the numbers of experienced reporters who have been bought out and are seeking the same jobs we are.

An old editor of mine who used to work for The Washington Post, and now teaches at an elite university in D.C., recently told me that he feels guilty about telling his journalism students to be ambitious about getting their first reporting jobs, because there's practically nothing out there. Such a bitter reality seems to be at odds with trends in academia, where applications to journalism schools continue to rise.

Four years ago, my journalism professors were mostly sticking to teaching the roots of what make up ideal stories: informative and interesting writing, balance and trustworthy sources. While these virtues still have a place in curricula, now they're being crowded by more lessons in what is called new media -- stuff like blogging, video, Twitter and web design that seem to fit more in a computer science or technology classroom than a journalism class. These new topics have been branded the future of journalism by media analysts and, in some cases, people with no background in journalism.

All this makes it feel like the bottom of the ninth inning for an American industry that is hundreds of years old and facing an existential crisis. The old players have been laid off. The new guys are pinch hitting, and we're supposed to know all the answers to curing a profession with a failed business model.

There are no steroids we can inject to cheat and prolong the game, and there's no guarantee that we can just shrug and say, "Well, there's always tomorrow." This is especially true for new graduates. Once we take a job outside of journalism, it's tougher than ever to get back in if we want to.

For one year, I've contributed blog posts to AOL News -- previously at Bright Hall -- and I've been inspired by some readers who embrace journalism in new forms and depressed by others who seem to hate all media. Sometimes it seems as if everyone is against reporters; when the Hartford Courant, a paper I reported for as an intern last summer, fired 100 workers in February, I seriously questioned whether it's a smart choice to enter this field. I know that some of the other college seniors contributing to this blog are similarly worried about plunging into this meager job market, especially during a sad recession.

We're up to bat, and the rain is screaming. With any luck, this game will stretch into extra innings.