What I Did with My College Journalism Degree

In 1998 I was the sole Journalism graduate from Point Loma Nazarene University out of a class of about 500 graduating seniors. Maybe everyone else got the memo and I didn't, but I spend the next decade trying to chase a sinking ship. Well, maybe it wasn't just sinking. Maybe that sounds too pessimistic. Maybe the ship is just becoming something else, like a submarine perhaps.

The following year I rose to the top of a small national magazine rather quickly. I was the editor in chief of Financial Sentinel, a tabloid magazine tracking the small cap stocks traded on domestic and international exchanges. I even had a luxury travel column each month. My publisher was a wrinkly man who always smelled of espresso and cigars, but I loved my job. In 2000, when the Internet Bubble burst, the magazine was shuttered. Its sister publication, MoneyWorld, which I continued to freelance for, was discontinued after Sept. 11, 2001.

A year later, frustrated with the lack of freelance writing assignments available, I had my uncle pull some strings to get me an interview at Orlando Sentinel. No dice. They were just entering a hiring freeze and my resume was piled on top of an already tall stack of wanna be reporters. Like any industry, when it's slow, you should go back to school.

In 2004 I graduated with a master's degree in Liberal Studies from Rollins College. The church I was working for at the time sponsored my education and also sent me to Ukraine and Africa to cover major international relief efforts there. While it wasn't the New York Times, it was great experience to be reporting back to the States, uploading photos and interviews from overseas.

By 2005, my Camelot job had arrived. I was the National Editor for a trade magazine that covered all the industries I loved: photography, film, advertising, marketing, graphic design. I helped launch 18 localized editions of one title, Create Magazine, with some of the most talented people I've ever met. Indicative of its time, Create suffered a similar fate to many of its cohorts. Bought and closed by a competitor.

And then came the web. In 2006 I worked for my first totally online magazine, Newsfactor Network, just outside Los Angeles. Articles were not assigned based on what we thought the readers of our title would like to see, and not even on what the advertisers would pair well with. Google was now an editor's best friend. I hated having to follow trending topics and hot headlines, creating headlines that would push our title's article to the top. I didn't feel like an editor. I felt like a Draconian machine.

By the time I reached out to contacts in New York for top tier magazine article access, it was too late. The magazine jobs are disappearing faster than the ice caps. Condé Nast, the holy grail of magazine employers, is clipping its editors like last year's bangs. And in case I missed the memo again, Gawker spells it out for me: "Magazine jobs are no longer secure, lucrative, or abundant enough to even be a viable option for those who would have had a whole buffet of them to choose from not long ago."

The worst part about all this is not that people are no longer interested in reading print magazines. The joy I felt when marrying text with art for each page's layout is still being enjoyed by readers. There are still more than 20,000 titles published in North America, according to Vocus, Inc., the public relations software company where I currently serve as managing editor. The reason my mirage has disappeared is because the business model is broken and technology is a cheap savior. So perhaps the sea that once was filled with print magazines, is now just more diverse but containing the same content. Stories are being told via Youtube, Twitter, and (my favorite) documentary films. The content is still there; the living wage isn't.

I thought about making my journalism certificate from Point Loma into some type of origami and mailing it back to the university. But then I imagined what my journalism professor might say to me: "Rebecca, if all I taught you to do was write inverted pyramid reports, then I failed you. I would like to think that I taught you how to question everything, how to articulate events for those who could not speak for themselves, and how to spell check." If that is the journalism degree I walked away from San Diego with 12 years ago, then I have a submarine to build.