Beat Reporting Topic

                So, I have been checking the news every day to see if any high schools are thinking about implementing a journalism program in the near future. Guess what? None of them are. How about the distant future? Nope, not even that. Let’s face it: not that many people in our society care about journalism. The field is dying, the job market is atrocious, you wouldn’t make any money as a journalist anyway, etc., etc. – the list goes on.

I am positive that there are still some teenagers who want to become journalists, but the pool is a small one. It goes beyond even the job market and all those other problems. You just don’t learn about journalism when you are growing up, so why would you want to be a journalist?! I can say with complete honesty that I did not know a single thing about the field of journalism until I was randomly put into a journalism class in my senior year of high school. That’s right – my senior year! By that time, I already had other aspirations, and it was just a meaningless elective to me. Oh sure, I had plenty of fun in that class, and I learned a lot, but I had already made up my mind that I wanted to be an English teacher long ago.

Well, it’s funny how things change, don’t they? Three years later – after learning that there was no way I wanted to talk about boring topics that were forced on you by the high school curriculum and that being an auditor would be a monotonous, painful job – I decided to try my hand in journalism again, and oh, how I loved it, but I wonder, would everybody be like me? Probably not. So, it should be very important that students are exposed to journalism much earlier on, so that they can develop an understanding about what the subject is about and see if it’s something they might be interested in.

In order for that to happen, more schools need to have journalism programs. It’s hard for some people to get into the ideal high school, and if they’re just placed in a zone school, then there’s a chance that they won’t have a journalism class or really, any class that they might want to take outside of the basic English, math, science and history ones. It’s always really sad when a high removes a journalism program by deeming it as “non-essential.” More responsibility needs to be placed on high schools to offer courses beyond the run-of-the-mill ones!