Winnemucca Nevada Jobs

Why journalism is still a good major

For Susan Brockus Wiesinger, journalism is more than an occupation, or even a calling. It’s in her blood.

Her grandfather was a newspaper publisher in Abilene, Texas. Her mother and father owned five small-town newspapers in the Southwest and Nevada. Her earliest memory is of sleeping under her dad’s office desk while he and her mother put the paper to bed. She started working at a newspaper—the Los Alamos (N.M.) Monitor, which her parents founded—when she was just 9 years old.

Today, at the age of 46, she’s the newly installed chairwoman of the Journalism Department at Chico State, where she is fervently making the case that, contrary to popular perception, the profession is not dying—far from it. If anything, she says, the skills the journalism program teaches—multiplatform writing and storytelling chief among them—are more in demand than ever before, and job opportunities abound.

Yes, she tells students, corporate daily newspapers are suffering mass layoffs, but the nation’s thousands of community newspapers are doing well, as are magazines. And the need for clearly and cleanly written content in other arenas—on the web, in business, on cable or broadcast television, in the public-relations field, and in many other areas—is growing rapidly.

When students ask her where they can find jobs, she has a one-word reply: “Everywhere.” The department has a “tremendous placement rate”—98 percent in the first two years—and “Our best PR students are getting really good jobs in places like New York City, San Francisco and Chicago.”

Here’s what she most wants interested students to know: “We are a writing program. That’s our thing.”

Her challenge, she says, is to get the word out about what the program offers. “Journalism has never had to market itself before, but now it does.

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