Tracy Brown Hamilton - Media and Journalism Professionals: A Practical Career Guide

Tracy Brown Hamilton is a writer, editor, and journalist based in the Netherlands. She has written several books on topics ranging from careers to media, economics to pop culture. She lives with her husband and three children.

EDITORIAL BOARD

Eric Evitts has been working with teens in the high school setting for twenty-three years. Most of his career has dealt with getting teens, especially at-risk students, to find and follow a career path of interest. He has developed curriculum for Frederick County Public Schools focusing on antibullying and career development. He is currently a counselor at South Hagerstown High School.

Danielle Irving-Johnson, MA, EdS, is currently the Career Services Specialist at the American Counseling Association. She exercises her specialty in career counseling by providing career guidance, services, and resources designed to encourage and assist students and professionals in attaining their educational, employment, and career goals while also promoting the importance of self-care, wellness, work-life balance, and burnout prevention. Irving-Johnson has also previously served as a mental health counselor and clinical intake assessor in community agency settings assisting diverse populations with various diagnoses.

Joyce Rhine Shull, BS, MS, is an active member of the Maryland Association of Community Colleges Career Affinity Group and the Maryland Career Development Association. She presently serves as an academic adviser in higher education, and teaches professionalism in the workplace as an adjunct professor. Her experience also includes two decades of management and career education of vocational courses and seminars for high school students.

Lisa Adams Somerlot is the President of American College Counseling Association and also serves as Director of Counseling at the University of West Georgia. She has a PhD in Counselor Education from Auburn University and is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Georgia and is a Nationally Approved Clinical Supervisor. She is certified in Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Strong Interest Inventory, and in Strengths Quest administration.

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D o you have a natural curiosity and a desire to develop your understanding of what is going on in the world around you? Are you fascinated by the stories of other people, from politicians to sports stars to everyday heroes, the lives they live, or the things they have accomplished? Are you committed to hearing different sides and points of view of the same issue? A career in journalism and the media will enable you not only to get the full story on topics that interest and affect you but also to enable others to have clear access to information that impacts their lives as well.

The fact that you picked this book off the shelf and are reading it indicates that you are ready to take your curiosity, research skills, and talent for story-telling to the next level: considering the journalism and the media as a career. Choosing a career is a difficult task, but as we discuss in more detail in , there are many methods and means of support to help you refine your career goal and a profession that will be satisfying and will fit you the best. Of course, the first step is understanding what a particular fieldin this case journalism and the mediaactually entails and informing yourself on the outlook of the profession. That is the emphasis of this chapter, which looks at defining the field in general and then in more specific terms, as well as examining the past and predicted future of the field.

Journalism and the media as a whole encompass a number of different jobs. Traditionally, one may think of a journalist or media professional as being a person who carries around a small notebook interviewing people to get to the bottom of a story. That is certainly true, but there are other types of careers that fall under the umbrella of media and journalism, such as editors, photographers, cartoonists, radio and television broadcasters, and so on. Beyond that, there are different types of journalism, based on such things as format, subject matter, and the voice of the journalist in the work itself. For example, there is a difference between an opinion piece and a news article in which writers convey facts without revealing their own viewpoints. (There will be a lot more on this in the book.)

What all careers in the field of journalism and the media have in common is storytellingby which we mean delivering accounts of actual events and not inventing fiction. There are many ways in which people want to learn about whats going on in the world (e.g., television, print media, online news providers, etc.), and journalists and media professionals are responsible for providing these services.

Depending on the media outlet for which you work and the type of story you follow, you could be part of providing anything from live, 24-hour, global news on television or working on longer, more contextual articles for monthly magazines. You may be working on a daily local newspaper or broadcasting live from a glamorous red carpet or a dangerous war zone.