“What are you going to do with your life”?

Journalism students are, at least theoretically, trained to ask questions. But thanks to a polar shift in the media industry, we’ve found ourselves tuning our canned answers to that loaded, never-ending question.

However, the media industry has already decided what the answer should be for students enrolled in the nation’s journalism schools: Drop your dreams and change your major.

A post from the widely-read Poynter Institute blogger Andrew Beaujon provides a long list of advice from fellow bloggers and newsies from publications like The Atlantic, Reuters and The Huffington Post. The most unsettling assessment of j-schools comes from former Florida political reporter Bill Cotterell, who wrote that he’d “estimate that the majority of really top reporters I’ve worked with over the years either didn’t have a journalism degree, or overcame it.”

Those are terrifying words for a j-schooler to hear – especially those who have dreamed of entering journalism for their entire lives. According to Cotterell’s advice, journalism graduates shouldn’t only worry about getting a job after school, but they must worry about “overcoming” their degree.

Reading this sort of pessimism in the media industry, I can’t help but think j-schools are becoming a scapegoat for problems the industry itself has created. This is most apparent when it comes from the mouth of Roger Ailes, the oft-criticized director of Fox News whose new media model has taken cable television from its golden age into acting as a mouthpiece for a certain political ideology (Fox News, MSNBC, Current), a vapid agent of inoffensive triangulation (CNN) or a 24-hour Casey Anthony news network (HLN).

Twenty-five years ago, cable news gave the media industry its last opportunity to progress closer to a more perfect form of reporting and analysis. They blew it, largely thanks to Fox and MSNBC’s coup of CNN in the late 1990s. Now, thanks to online journalism, the opportunity to democratize and improve journalism education has presented itself and many j-schools, including UW’s, have responded accordingly, unwilling to allow a journalistic disaster to repeat itself.

Journalism schools cannot be immune from criticism – one of the main flaws of journalism education is the overemphasis of new practices at the cost of the basics of writing and reporting that form the foundations of good journalism in any medium. But journalism students are not learning only how to report. UW’s j-school might be one of the most interdisciplinary at the entire university; our director is a trained computer scientist and professors hold degrees in varied fields from the physical sciences to history, law and philosophy. Felix Salmon, a columnist at Reuters, lamented that journalism schools do not teach their students how to read or write critically enough. He should sit in on a class in Madison.

Most journalists-in-training already know that one academic major won’t suffice in the job market, so they add another discipline that complements their expertise. For students here, this most often includes an extra degree in political science, international studies, economics or computer science. Some reporting-track students even decide to hold their noses and study strategic communications in case they don’t fulfill their post-graduation dreams.

I wouldn’t be surprised if professors or media critics were willing to call this one of the most exciting times to be a student in a j-school. The changes many institutions across the nation are undergoing are remarkable despite residing in a profession surrounded by such dark clouds.

But if new media startups or old media establishments migrating to the Internet really want to see continued high quality in the journalism world, they must hire journalism graduates. We’re learning lessons of new media and ethics in addition to our secondary fields of expertise, and we mostly accept proposals for a more democratized media model.

Failing to recognize this will not just spoil the dreams of thousands of students, but it could lead to the same failings of reporting and public confidence in media that has been a narrative of mass communication history for the last 20 years. So while it may be selfish: Please, please hire us.

Ryan Rainey ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism and Latin American studies.