Meet Alana Taylor: Another College Whiner

Recently, a junior at NYU named Alana Taylor made some noise with a whiny, naive article she wrote slamming the journalism program at her school for being behind the times in terms of embracing every new Internet phenomenon that comes down the pike [her product placed, advertisement-raised generation's claim to fame].
Most of the article seems primarily concerned with celebrating Taylor's own "social media maven" skills, the number of trendy technologies she knows how to use--while at the same time illustrating that her writing and critical thinking skills are fairly pedestrian.

"The truth of the matter is that by the time my generation, Gen Y, gets into the real world there will be a much higher demand for web-savvy writers and thinkers than traditional Woodwards and Bernsteins. I was hoping that NYU would offer more classes where I could understand the importance of digital media, what it means, how to adapt to the new way of reporting, and learn from a professor who understands not only where the Internet is, but where it’s going."

Hmmmmm. Clearly, Taylor already thinks she knows where things are headed. The problem with people like her is they ignore the real function of journalism and writing--they don't want to do investigative work or learn how to communicate with mass audiences, instead preferring to ramble only for others who think like they do, or subscribe to the same social networking.

By ignoring real reporting (a la "Woodwards and Bernsteins"), Taylor seems to thumb her nose at the important historical function of the journalist's job of telling truth to power. Indeed, she seems more interested in blabbing on and on about her own, inexperienced opinions: what most of the millions of online blogs do.
Sadly, she is woefully mistaken if she thinks blogging alone will make money. She makes it clear how naive she really is with statements like these:

"What surprises me further is when Professor Quigley informs us that people actually get paid to blog. That they make a living off of this. For me this was very much a “duh” moment and I thought that it would be for the rest of the students as well. They should be fully aware at this point that blogging has become a very serious form of journalism. Furthermore, they should be aware that it is the one journalistic venture that requires little or no ladder-climbing. You can start at any age, with almost no experience, and actually get published instead of fetch coffee."

Taylor needs to understand that ladder-climbing can be another name for learning your craft or gaining experience. Most bloggers out there today do not get paid. The ones that do are typically established journalists who earned their reputation in print, or sometimes online, with good reporting and writing skills--which Taylor clearly has none of, or she might have cited statistics in her story, or done the slightest bit of digging about the phenomena she hopes to understand.

Taylor and other newbies need to understand that most bloggers simply comment on news they get from mainstream sites, where traditionally trained journalists are still climbing that old ladder. Without real reporters, and newsrooms around the world with budgets to report, bloggers would be left with very little to talk about. There are very few bloggers that do their own reporting, even less that do it well.
See this Pew study from 2006 that shows bloggers are most interested in talking about themselves.

This may be reading too much into it: but Taylor seems representative of a new "me" generation that believes socializing is a legitimate life's calling. She is part of a generation already earning poor reviews in a variety of fields for a lack of work ethic and inability to focus on anything that requires sustained effort or sacrifice. Taylor's generation has been fed from an electromagnetic teat since birth and immunized to critical thought by billion dollar ad campaigns that quite literally run their lives. That's not to say that J-schools shouldn't be teaching modern technology trends--but the key is to put them into the service of good journalism.