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>> [ANCHOR]: It’s an ever-changing business, full of challenge and opportunity. Journalism
students at RIT this week got insight into what they’ll be up against when they hit
the job market. Seth Voorhees has more.
>> As journalists we cannot be objective about our right to exist. When it comes to these
issues we need to be there at the table.
>> [REPORTER]: A message delivered this week to a room full of students at RIT with a stake
in the future of journalism. The state of the business depends on whose lenses you’re
looking through.
>> [HICKERSON]: The idea is not to predict the future, but to start asking the right
questions because obviously the business is changing a lot.
>> [REPORTER]: The media landscape is changing. Many traditional forms of media are struggling.
>> [JOHNSTON]: That means they’re going to be other opportunities out there because
people need information.
>> [REPORTER]: Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston says young journalists
must be sharp.
>> [JOHNSTON]: The important element for young people who want to go into journalism is to
understand that they have to actually know something useful. The era in which you could
superficial and simply tell a story, that is be a failed novelist who writes stories
that accurately quote people is over.
>> [REPORTER]: Accuracy itself became an issue in some well-covered stories recently. The
Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax, reporting the wrong name for hours for the Sandy Hook gunman,
just name a few.
>> [JOHNSTON]: When I worked for the Los Angles Times, it wasn’t unusual for a reporter
to spend a year on a story.
>> [REPORTER]: Johnston says business pressures have wiped those days away.
>> [JOHNSTON]: Now all sorts of shops are hiring people expecting them to do 10 stories
a day. Guess what? Quality and content and accuracy fall off.
>> [REPORTER]: There are other challenges. Reporters Without Borders proclaimed 2012
a dangerous year for journalists worldwide. Here at home
>> [MAN]: Go away. Go away. Go away.
>> [REPORTER]: many of the challenges of the first amendment variety.
>> [OSTERREICHER]: Basically, all they want to do is get you to stop doing what you're
doing. It also has, in a legal sense, we call it a chilling effect on the first amendment.
>> [REPORTER]: Mickey Osterreicher is a former photojournalist and a current lawyer with
the National Press Photographer's Association. He says it's almost a perfect storm scenario.
More people have more cameras. The definition of who's a journalist and who's not has become
blurred. Traditional media outlets are doing more with less, journalists becoming 'jacks
of all trades.'
>> [OSTERREICHER]: The rights of journalists nowadays, seem to be challenged. I deal with
issues of photographers being interfered with and arrested around the country, almost on
a daily basis.
>> This part of the dark side of how technology is changing journalism, but there's many bright
spots as well.
>> [REPORTER]: Those bright spots are part of the RIT focus, where ever-changing technology
will mesh with traditional journalism, a changing world and, say the experts, an exciting future.
>> [HICKERSON]: I think there's never really been a better time to go into journalism,
if you're willing to experiment, to take those risks.
>> Seth Voorhees, YNN.