A sense of belonging.
As long as I remember I’ve always been the one student in every class that has a question or an opinion. I’ve never felt ashamed of it but it has always made me curious why my other classmates didn’t asked as many questions as me.
At the same time, I’ve taken almost any extra curricular activity you can thought: cooking, tennis, singing, athletics, guitar, french, and so on. For a long time that made me feel that I didn’t belong to any particular group.
Turned out that being curious, ask many questions and love for learning is exactly what journalists do.
But now that I found my place, I look around me and the entire field is evolving into something different that what Journalism meant ten years ago.
For instance, the job itself it’s facing an economic dispute. Businesses are not investing in traditional media anymore, they are turning to social media because that is where consumers are.
That leaves the journalists with the big challenge to come up with new skills to learn for us to keep our jobs.
But the media crisis is not an isolated issue. The only way to understand the context of this transition is if we look at the technological advances particularly social media.
Social Media platforms have been with us for more than a decade and it is time to regulate them.
And even thought the audience has the control now over what content they want to consume, the roll of the media it’s as important as it was before. Now we have to be the reliable source around the tons of information and fake news.
I believe the only way that journalists can thrive in this evolving context is to adapt, to keep learning, to keep asking, to keep curious.
The difference is that the skills we have to acquire are more in the tech word for us to deliver our content to the audience like programing a website that is easy to navigate or creating a newsletter.
So returning to the initial question what has journalism given me? A purpose.
This new challenges full of questions and skills to develop are like a greenfield for us. If only, it only give us direction.