Today Aiesha Little of the Society of Professional Journalists’ blog passed along an interesting request from the Columbia Journalism Review. CJR is preparing a new feature on how new journalists see our profession, and their prospects in it.
Little quoted an unnamed person from CJR: “[We want to hear from] young people who’ve come into the profession in the last five years or so, and the young journalism students who soon will. We invite them to air their concerns and hopes about journalism, too.” The central questions:
- What do you see in this business that makes you still want to pursue it?
- How do you imagine people will get quality news five years down the road?
- How will you try to fit in?
Want to participate? If you’re a young or new journalist, please e-mail CJR to contribute your thoughts.
Contributed e-mails will be compiled into a forthcoming CJR.org feature, “Starting Thoughts.” This follows on the heels of an online feature CJR published this summer: “In July, we invited laid-off and bought-out journalists to reflect on their experience in the form of a letter to colleagues. We published a number of them on our Web site under the rubric Parting Thoughts, and will continue to do so as they arrive.”
I think “Starting Thoughts” is a great idea, and I hope CJR manages to get the word out about it to enough new journalists and journalism students to get a good response. <!–However, as far as I can tell, they are missing some key opportunities to connect. So far, CJR's call for contributions appears only on a couple of journalism organization blogs: the SPJ post and also on the blog of the University of Cincinnati’s Association of Black Journalists. There doesn’t appear to be any mention of it on CJR’s own site.
I’m guessing that someone at CJR probably just sent an e-mail to a few journalism organizations to promote this project. That’s a start, but if they seriously want to reach young journalists they must do more — they must go where the young people are.
Here are some promotion ideas CJR might try:
- Create a submissions form on CJR.org so that you have a hyperlink to promote. This reduces a key barrier to participation: If would-be contributors only have to click once to get to where they can share their thoughts immediately, it’s more likely that more people will contribute. In contrast, publishing an e-mail address (especially as text only, not even as a clickable “mailto” link) puts too many steps between the desire to contribute and the action. While it’s a good idea to accept e-mail contributions, that shouldn’t be the only way to participate. E-mail is not the preferred communication channel for most young people.
- Reach out via social media. Good bets would be the WiredJournalists community, Facebook groups for journalism schools or students, Twitter, and other social media services popular with college students and 20-somethings. (Unfortunately, CJR doesn’t own the CJR Twitter ID — but worse, neither CJR nor the Columbia school of journalism appears to have an official presence on Twitter.)
- Encourage Columbia students to promote the project via their own social networks — especially via text messaging, social media, online communities, and their own blogs or sites.
Best of luck with this project, CJR.
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