I recently graduated with my Master's in New Media Journalism from Full Sail University.
One thing that was consistently reinforced during my time at Full Sail was that media and entertainment are constantly changing.
Whether you're studying New Media Journalism, Sports Broadcasting, Film, Gaming, or another field within media and entertainment, you're preparing to enter an industry where the tools, platforms, and ways we create and share work are constantly evolving.
Technology changes.
Platforms change.
Audiences change.
The way people consume information changes.
And because of that, the way we create has to evolve too.
That's something Full Sail helps prepare its students for. You're not simply learning how the industry operates right now. You're learning how to work in an environment where the tools, technology, and expectations surrounding your craft will continue to change.
For me, that field is journalism.
More specifically, New Media Journalism.
So maybe it's fitting that after graduating, one of the biggest questions I found myself wrestling with was:
What does the future of journalism actually look like?
But before I could really answer that, I had another question to answer.
What was I going to do with this degree?
Because after graduating, I knew one thing.
I didn't want my degree to just sit!
Yeah, I know. Earning the degree was something I personally wanted to accomplish.
Why?
Well, I have three other siblings who completed college all the way up to earning their Master's degrees, and I was the only child left who hadn't.
And me being the person that I am, I wanted to make sure I did something that would make my parents proud of all of their children.
So, I set out on the journey.
One year later, here I am.
But now that I have the degree, I want to do something more than just exist.
I don't want to simply be someone who has a voice.
Or someone who completed all of the requirements and now has the credentials to say, I'm a journalist.
I don't want to be remembered for just that one story that gave me a face or a name.
I want to do something bigger.
Not just for me.
But for the future of journalism.
And maybe that's where everything Full Sail had been preparing me for started making even more sense.
Because if journalism is going to continue changing, we can't spend all of our time trying to recreate the newsroom exactly as it used to be.
We have to understand where it came from, protect the things that still matter, and be willing to explore where it's going.
The Newsroom Doesn't Look the Same Anymore
One day, I was sitting around rummaging through social media, looking through Facebook groups, YouTube videos and Instagram pages that related to journalists, writers, bloggers and other people doing the kind of work I do.
I came across several conversations about the different platforms people use to create a story, article, blog or finished piece of work.
And I realized something.
We really don't have one central outlet that allows us to do everything in one space.
At least, I couldn't find it.
I know for me, doing the work of a journalist can get a little dizzy at times.
I may start in Microsoft Word or Apple Pages just to jot down an idea or begin a rough draft.
Then I'm jumping over to Google or EBSCO to research.
I may use ChatGPT as another tool to help me figure out where I should start looking.
Then I'm on YouTube watching videos that may correlate with the story.
Before I know it, I have a browser full of tabs.
I've saved websites.
I've bookmarked sources.
I've got notes in different places.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that...
I'm lost!
And we haven't even gotten to the actual reporting yet.
New Media Journalism Is More Than Writing
That's the thing about New Media Journalism.
We're not simply writing anymore.
I still need to find people to interview.
I may need to record those interviews.
Maybe the conversation becomes part of a podcast.
Maybe there's video.
Maybe there's audio.
Maybe there's both.
Now I need to edit all of that.
Maybe I photographed the person I interviewed.
Maybe I need to research that person before I ever sit down with them.
Then I've got to take the research, interviews, photographs, audio, video and everything else I've gathered and somehow bring it all together into one story.
That's a lot!
But that's also journalism today.
The newsroom has evolved.
And it isn't the first time.
Remember the Old Newsroom?
Think about what journalism used to require.
Do you remember file cabinets?
What about running to the library to find historical information about a person, place or thing?
There wasn't FaceTime.
There wasn't Zoom.
There wasn't Microsoft Teams.
If a journalist needed to interview someone, there was the telephone.
Or sometimes that journalist had to travel miles, across states or even to another country to sit across from that person.
Even something as ordinary to us now as recorded audio had to begin somewhere. In 1877, Thomas Edison developed the phonograph, a machine capable of recording and reproducing sound.
Now look at us. I can pull a phone out of my pocket and record an entire interview with the press of a button.
No giant machine.
No tape recorder.
No dedicated recording studio.
Just...
click.
The conversation is being recorded.
That's innovation.
And journalism didn't disappear because of it.
We've Had This Conversation Before
This is where studying the history of journalism becomes interesting.
Because the fear surrounding a changing newsroom isn't new.
In The Future of Journalism: Risk, Threats and Opportunities, journalism scholar Bob Franklin describes a period when journalists were looking at the arrival of new media with serious concern.
Traditional newspaper readership and revenue were declining.
Journalists were losing jobs.
Some positions were being completely redefined.
Experienced print journalists suddenly found themselves having to learn new skills, including producing video for the web.
The newsroom they knew was changing.
And people were worried.
Sound familiar?
Franklin ultimately describes journalism as,
Experiencing a sustained period of rapid and far-reaching change.
Not only in the way journalists do their jobs, but in how the journalism industry itself operates.
That's important.
Because sometimes we talk about today's changing newsroom as though journalism was perfectly still until somebody suddenly showed up and disrupted it.
It wasn't.
Journalism has been evolving the entire time.
So What Exactly Is a Newsroom Now?
That's the question I keep coming back to.
Because when I think about the traditional newsroom, I picture reporters, editors, producers, photographers and other journalists working together inside of a physical space.
But what does that look like today?
A freelance journalist may be sitting at home with a MacBook.
Another journalist may be interviewing someone through Zoom.
A photographer can transmit images from the field.
Someone else may be producing an entire multimedia story from a smartphone.
Independent journalists can publish directly to audiences without ever walking into a traditional newsroom.
Social media has become a place to discover sources, follow developing stories, distribute reporting and connect with audiences.
In a PBS NewsHour discussion titled, "New Media Models Disrupt Traditional Journalism", the topic fits directly into this larger conversation.
New media didn't simply give journalists some new gadgets.
It helped change the model.
And I think that's an important distinction.
The traditional newsroom didn't necessarily die.
And maybe that's the part we sometimes miss. A newsroom doesn't have to be defined only by a building. It can also be defined by the work happening inside it or, increasingly, the work happening outside of it. The reporting, interviewing, verification, editing and accountability remain. Where those things happen is what has changed.
The newsroom expanded beyond its walls.
That's What Made Me Want to Build Something
The more I thought about all of this, the more I kept coming back to my own workflow.
All those tabs.
All those platforms.
All those different tools.
Research over here.
Writing over there.
Audio somewhere else.
Video somewhere else.
Notes somewhere else.
Community somewhere else.
So I decided to do something.
I created a platform.
I call it Convrse.
Convrse brings different parts of that workflow together. Registered users can record and save interviews through Conversations, organize reporting notes in the Notebook, use Resources for research, develop and publish work through Stories, and interact with other journalists and storytellers through the Common Area and Beats. Pulse helps users discover potential topics and information for developing stories. The goal isn't to replace outside tools such as Google, EBSCO or YouTube. It's to give journalists a central newsroom to return to while using them. The idea is to create a central hub where freelance journalists, writers and bloggers can work through the process of creating a finished piece without feeling like everything has to exist in completely different places.
Not because the old way was wrong.
And definitely not because I think I've figured out some magical new way to do journalism.
I haven't.
I simply looked at the way I work as a New Media Journalist and thought:
There has to be a better way to bring some of this together.
Convrse isn't just an idea sitting on my computer anymore. The web platform is live and welcoming registered users while I continue developing, testing and refining its features. We're also working on bringing the platform to mobile.
And while building it, another part of the modern newsroom kept showing up.
Artificial intelligence.
And Yeah...There's AI
I'll admit, incorporating AI into Convrse made me hesitate.
Before and while I was developing the platform, I started doing what I had already been doing, scrolling.
Facebook.
Instagram.
YouTube.
I saw journalists and writers saying things like, I don't need AI to do something I'm already capable of doing.
Others described using AI as cheating.
And I'm sitting there looking at my phone or MacBook thinking:
Man, should I really be doing this?
But I kept reading.
I kept watching.
And I started finding journalists, writers and bloggers who weren't asking AI to replace them.
They were using different forms of technology to assist them.
Maybe it helped with structure.
Maybe it was a grammar tool like Grammarly.
Maybe ChatGPT or Google's Gemini helped point them toward subjects they needed to research further.
That's where I became more comfortable with what I wanted AI to be within Convrse.
A tool.
Not the journalist.
Not the voice.
Not the storyteller.
And definitely not the person responsible for deciding what's true.
But journalism involves something much more complicated than processing information.
It involves judgment.
Context.
Accuracy.
People.
Ethics.
AI may be able to assist with parts of the process.
It can't be accountable for my journalism. I have to be.
Some Things Shouldn't Change
That's where the old newsroom and the new newsroom still meet.
Technology can change.
Our tools can change.
The way we distribute stories can change.
The physical newsroom can change.
But the responsibility of the journalist shouldn't.
As journalists, we're still responsible for following principles like those established by the Society of Professional Journalists.
Seek truth and report it.
Minimize harm.
Act independently.
Be accountable and transparent.
Those responsibilities don't disappear because I'm holding an iPhone instead of a tape recorder.
They don't disappear because I publish online instead of in tomorrow morning's newspaper.
And they certainly don't disappear because AI exists.
If anything, new technology means we need those principles even more.
Old Ways. New Tools. Same Responsibility.
The social-media conversations I've referenced throughout this piece aren't findings from a formal study or survey. They're posts, conversations and opinions I personally encountered while trying to understand how others working in and around journalism were responding to change.
The below post caught my attention while browsing on instagram, because of one sentence in particular:
“The journalism industry is changing, but storytelling isn’t.”
In an Instagram post reflecting on a conversation with veteran journalist Jemele Hill about building an independent media career after ESPN, Ashlee Brown reflected on something that feels directly connected to what I'm seeing within New Media Journalism: today's journalist may be doing much more than simply reporting and publishing a story.
Journalists are building communities around their work.
They're developing their own platforms and audiences.
They're exploring different ways to support themselves financially.
And they're finding their place within a growing creator economy.
That doesn't mean journalism suddenly becomes content creation without standards, or that every journalist needs to become an influencer.
To me, it means the walls around what we've traditionally considered a newsroom are continuing to move.
And that's what this entire journey has been teaching me.
Journalism isn't leaving the traditional newsroom behind.
It's taking pieces of that newsroom with it as it continues to evolve.
Research is still research.
An interview is still an interview.
A source is still a source.
Accuracy is still accuracy.
Storytelling is still storytelling.
But where we tell those stories, how we tell them, how we reach the people we're telling them to, and even how independent journalists build careers around that work—that's changing.
The tools surrounding journalism are changing.
And they'll probably change again.