Career Advice
Perhaps the most appropriate headline of all, given the subject matter, was this: “How to Make a Paper Airplane Out of Your Journalism Degree.” It tops the sad tale of one Rebecca Bredhold, who received her accreditation in 1998, just in time for the long, slow gutting of the news industry.
Rebecca relates her match through rejections and magazine closings, an epiphany that print magazines were going extinct and, of course, the moment in 2006 when she washed up on a little island in the archipelago of web-only publishing where, apparently, self-awareness is banned. Working for something called the Newsfactor Network, she had the Sara Connor-like discovery that machines had indeed risen:
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.
