CLOSING REMARKS
I’ve heard it said that journalism is a dying field.
The sentence always leaves my head reeling and my heart pulsing. The wind gets knocked out of my lungs, and I fear for any future I had planned. A dozen questions race through my mind: Where will people learn news? Who will share stories? What will happen to my future?
I always come back to the same, crippling thought: How can the very thing I live for be on the brink of death?
It’s no secret that being a journalist comes with its own set of concerns. The pay isn’t great, the recognition is slim and the hours are long. These simple facts are enough to turn away anyone with a little more sense of self-preservation. But, like the journalists that still make up this “dying field,” I believe two simple things — the world needs to hear stories and I need to tell them.
These two things led me to where I am now, committed to studying journalism at the University of Oklahoma. Journalism is not a dying field to me, but rather the place where stories live and where change can be made.
I owe this dream to scholastic journalism. On paper, my last four years taught me how to craft a narrative, what feels like a million AP Style rules and what makes a good news pitch. In practice, my last four years taught me much more than that.
I learned how to be a listener. My scholastic career stems from hundreds of hours of interviewing, and even more to hand-transcribe each interview. My mission is to get every story right, to do justice to the heartbroken and hurting people willing to tell their stories. This aspect bled into parts of my everyday life, allowing me to land management positions at my jobs and an internship at a local magazine. It also taught me how to just be there for someone without having a magical solution.
I learned how to be a leader. I could attribute this fact to teaching 20 toddlers every week or running evening shifts at Chick-Fil-A, but what got me those jobs in the first place was my experiences with scholastic journalism. I first joined the staff of “The Hawk Eye” the second semester of my freshman year, being the youngest reporter on staff. Due to my age, I was hesitant to apply for an editor position, but, under the recommendation of my advisor, became the entertainment editor my sophomore year. Leading those older than me was something I feared at the beginning, but I learned to make up for my age with experience and dedication to the publication. The next year, that dedication led me to a position as the managing editor; the year after that, I’m now the editor-in-chief. I learned how to be a leader from being thrown head-first into it, and I want to continue leading for the rest of my life.
But, most of all, I learned how to serve something much greater than myself.
The stories I write have my byline, but they are not mine. Each page belongs to those brave enough to share their voices. For “The Next Destination,” I sat with then-junior Izzy Frederick on the porch of a Starbucks, and she told me all she wanted her story to do was tell someone else it gets better. For “Codebreaker,” I listened to senior Kezia Sunil explain the wall she faced when trying to pursue what she loved. For the stories about school board funding, I met with the members of my community to share their fears about schools being shut down and dove into state funding for hours on end.
It is not a string of awards or lack of other passions that leads me into journalism, it is that these stories deserve to get told and I could never imagine doing anything other than telling them. I love journalism with everything I am because it is everything I am.
The days might be long, the pay might not be great and appreciation might be rare, but journalism is my future. It is the thing that keeps me pushing forward, that’s led me to two after-school jobs in the hopes that I can pay off college early and dedicate my life to a career for more than just money. So, no, journalism is not a dying field — it is what I want to spend my life loving.