Photo of Jim Brady taken on my cell phone
“If you still don’t get that the web is it, I don’t have time to try to convince you.”
This is what guest speaker Jim Brady has believed since 1994, when he tried to convince his employer, the Washington Post, that the newspaper needed a website to stay current. Back then, he said, people dismissed the web as a fad. But, as he pointed out, the internet is still where news is going.
“What has to happen before [journalists] realize that the web is the next phase?” he said.
Brady suggested that student journalists should focus on entreprenurship and blogging. He said that news is becoming more niche and readers are turning to highly specialized blogs to get their news. Brady said that right now, we student journalists can benefit from becoming specialized in a subject. If we know it well enough and develop sources in the field, our blogs could even compete with newspapers.
“It’s a meritocracy,” he said. “If you do something and do it well, you’ll succeed.”
