Thursday, September 17, 2009

a bit too dramatic for a cover letter

I graduated from Seattle University with a degree in journalism. From the graduation ceremony, you could actually hear the walls of Post-Intelligencer caving in on it self. For four years, we studied the art of collecting and contextualizing daily trivia, listening to professors lecture us about how television and now the internet have corrupted what was once the practical skill of objective journalism, never to ask the important questions. That is, maybe we were wrong all along? Maybe we were naïve to think that journalism is the truth and that the public, who prefer to get daily news, filtered through partisan channels and marketing agencies, is wrong? Maybe the time has come, to rethink what we think we know about how people hunger for information and how they consume it? Time to let this failed dream die, wake up now to the reality of what consumers want, the value content providers imagine they provide, and the disparity between the two ideas.



I like the Thomas Jefferson quote in the picture above: Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

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