There’s been something of a stigma around journalism majors as of late. Proven facts show that the newspaper hasn’t had a good fiscal year since 2005, and thus assumed facts show that there’s no point in pursuing a career in a “dying medium.” We live in the age of dying mediums: newspaper, radio, even cable television, are all on what is being considered a “decline.” The internet conquers all, and we are all putty in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg. While the latter may very well be true, there’s no reason to be putting down the hopeful journalists of tomorrow.

I myself am pursuing a degree in creative writing and multimedia- put two and two together, and the crossbreed of those is journalism. And so while my future may, from an outsider’s perspective, look like a bleak series of dead end jobs and submitted essays, where you see barista and BuzzFeed, I see hope. Hope that perhaps, with a little bit of action, the world of muckraking and yellow legal pads (or, perhaps now with updated technology, a digitized version of the legal pad with touchscreen capabilities) will be reborn.

Journalism is considered a dying medium for three reasons:

1. The monster that is our social media “feed” is swallowing the minds of young generations whole, pooing them out as little click-bait addicted pea-sized entities, unable to process anything that doesn’t end in “And It was SO Not OK.”

2. It is incredibly expensive, time-consuming, and even the turn-over is hardly worth it, as printed media is, yes, at a decline in sales.

3. Donald Trump.

I’ll address the last one first because it seems like something one might say to be funny or ironic (Why is it raining? Donald Trump. Why can’t I finish my essay? Donald Trump). However, I mean this with an absolutely genuine manner.

I attended a lecture by a member on the board of media at NYU who spoke on the subject, and his points were incredibly valid and also aligned closely with my own: Donald Trump discredits the media. Since Mr. Trump himself makes improvised statements, as opposed to owning up to it, he accuses the media of exactly that. All news is now eligible to be labeled as “fake news” and it gives journalists a not-so-nice reputation and an inability to bring to the table what they truly have to offer without prejudice from the reader.

The media frenzy started by Donald Trump is not, however, the end of journalism as we know it. It is instead an opportunity for journalists to work with this label of “fake news” and validate themselves and their opinions. It is an opportunity for those aspiring to be great to dig deeper and prove the facts that they can prove and state outright that their opinion is exactly that: an opinion, separate from fact. Perhaps after four to eight (please God, let it be four) years of Trump’s America, we’ll be brought into a new era where media is validated and the news will return to becoming a source for stone cold facts.

That being said, the media is not in steep decline because of “fact vs. fake” alone. There is also the issue of print becoming obsolete for the 77% of Americans that are currently receiving any piece of news they could possibly desire through a smartphone. A broader, more immediately gratifying, platform for news means that information can be shared with less sleuthing. We live in the Information Age, where there is, at any given moment, billions of pieces of information circulating from person to person across the internet. Information on celebrities, politics, the earth, and anything lifestyle-oriented can all be found at the click of a link: no need to hunt that file down.

The gained popularity of internet news is brilliant, and one of the few instances where I completely understand why the field of journalism is shrinking. There’s so many people on so many different platforms that are able to get information across the web with the click of a mouse, that the tedious process that journalists once went about to find and source information seems odd and archaic. Even the process of picking up a tangible morning paper seems somehow very ancient and undesirable. For this I only have one solution, and I call it “The Vinyl Theory.”

Tens of thousands of years ago, when T. Rex walked the Earth and “Pong” was super hot, there was this absolutely necessary thing called vinyl. These big, chunky plastic discs were placed on a big, clunky device that was the only medium available for musical entertainment (aside from the live stuff, and the cassette, which was slightly newer but not relevant to this analogy). They were an awful pain in the ass, but something about the sound of them, their sturdy definition and occasional rustling, brought them back soon after they had been outdated by digitization.

The young folk love their vinyl records, myself included, and there’s something about the tangibility of them that makes them irreplaceable. I can only hope the same will become of the newspaper, that after an attempt to bring an end to the black-and-white staple of the American morning, young folk such as myself will start buying back into the newspaper industry, and realize what they’ve been missing out on all these years. This realization can only be made, however, if my generation can take interest in something that isn’t minute-to-minute updates on Kylie Jenner and her motley crew of celebrity friends. This is, of course, my final reason that journalism is dying, which is that it’s being replaced by the BuzzFeeds of the world.

I know, there is some irony in the situation, as Odyssey is something of a more opinion-based BuzzFeed-type platform, and so I’m thus feeding into the problem rather than the solution in that respect. However, my fellow writers and I generally try to put out something of substance week-to-week, which is something that I do not think many BuzzFeed writers can say in all honesty. The click-bait era is at a rise, and it’s because the instant gratification that comes with filling one’s mind with completely useless information while scrolling through a feed composed almost entirely of exactly that, is much easier than the less instant gratification of picking up a newspaper, or even reading an article of substance on one’s phone.

This makes journalism an even more difficult art form, because with so many different people putting out so many different articles and quizzes and viral stories about social media posts that went viral, quality becomes less valuable than quantity. This may sound sardonic and cynical of me to say, especially about something that afflicts my own generation (and more often than not, myself), but it’s the honest reality of the situation. Social media has created a platform of amateur journalism, which posts articles that draw people in without providing them with so much as something informative to take away.

Even The New York Times, which I often admire for its resilience and strong team, often falls to (while slightly more intellectual) articles about old married couples that play on pathos, and Donald Trump’s wife’s dinner regiment which plays on the unnamed inner desire to obtain useless information about affluent individuals. It’s unfortunately probably the only way that even such grand newspaper sources can stay alive and standing. It’s also the reason why we, you and me and my 18-24 constituents, need to realize that the type of “informed” that we’re becoming is really distracted ignorance, which keeps our mind fluttering between this and that, but doesn’t allow us to understand main ideas.

Journalism used to bring to the table those main ideas; those stories which unraveled into massive pieces that exposed politics and societal figures and industry, and that had us reading the news like a novel- not a collection of poems by Shel Silverstein. To bring back that enthusiasm for the big picture, to pay attention to real pieces of news, is to bring back the art of journalism.