Is journalism disappearing? These top educators have a lot to say about that
As I left my meeting with the head of the journalism department, my fingers were frozen together, a physical phenomenon that happens in times of great stress or happiness.
I had just been offered a chance to redesign a course called Media Management and Entrepreneurship, a class that hadn't been taught at the University of Kentucky in roughly seven years.
Over the following weeks, I jotted down the names of guest speakers I planned to have (Owen Thomas, Drew Curtis and Gabriel Dunn would visit) and the themes I wanted to address. There were three companies I knew I had to expose my students to each semester:
Gawker, BuzzFeed News and Vice.
These were disruptive startups who, a decade ago, thumbed their noses at naysayers and raised the middle finger to hidebound news organizations. These three companies appealed to a coveted younger, internet-obsessed, audience that has long eluded legacy media businesses. Not to mention, all three had habits of hiring young and diverse people.
It was 2014 and I ended each class discussion on these three companies with a link to their job boards showing dozens of open positions at each.
Today, those same hyperlinks from Gawker, BuzzFeed News and Vice are broken, empty, or filled with a small fraction of the open news positions they once had.
The news that Vice would reportedly stop publishing stories on its namesake website was a dour crescendo in the history of these three companies (Gawker's original incarnation shut down in and BuzzFeed News ceased publication of its Pulitzer Prize-winning website ).
