Dear readers,
As this school year comes to a close, I tell you all, “Goodbye.” This is just a temporary goodbye because I will be coming back next year to my Wingspan amazing team.
You may have noticed already that this year we’ve begun to post more articles on NixaJournalism.net. As the journalism industry changes, we adjust with it.
This year, when I interviewed my Advanced Placement Government and Politics teacher, Alexander Edwards, he asked me, “Do you want to go into journalism in the future?”
I told him, “Maybe, but I’m not sure because it is a dying industry.” Instead of agreeing, he corrected me and called it a “changing industry.”
Now I love that view, but the issue is, we don’t know how journalism will change in the next four years. Will the reporters in the Oval Office be the same? Probably not. Will the print industry die off? Hopefully not. But one thing I do know is that journalism is changing quicker than ever before.
If you’re not like me and you don’t want to go into journalism, you might ask, ‘Why does this matter to me?’ While the 24-hour news cycle can invoke fear and paranoia, a world without news is not all rainbows and sunshine. Instead, we would live in ignorance. The knowledge of events happening on the other side of the world or even in your local community is a privilege.
While there are immense privileges to news, one that sticks with all of us is real-time safety alerts. On March 14, Nixa and its neighboring communities went on lockdown as a tornado swept through community after community. Luckily, because of weather alerts, there were no fatalities. Aside from weather reports, we benefit from the news updates us on safety threats at our schools. Back in September, when two Nixa elementary schools faced bomb threats, local news outlets quickly picked up the story and reassured Nixa parents that nobody had been injured.

Even if these examples didn’t affect you personally, news is always affecting your life. From election coverage to social media trends, news is living with us.
Social media has become one of our main sources of news. During the 2024 election, the amount of political content we saw was absurd. But this stems further than just political content. Discussions about mental health have become more normalized on social media. Content sharing different perspectives has thrived. All of which were influenced by social media and journalism morphing into their own creation.
Journalism and social media are far from being perfect. But what I want you to understand is that they will continue to morph and the journalism industry will not look the same in the next four years. This matters because you need to be ready for when it changes. The shocking truth is that you will change with journalism because journalism tends to change based on the needs of the audience.
Rather than focus on the fears surrounding the news, look at it for its complexities: A nuanced world providing you information that many people don’t have access to, that keeps you safe and is focused on informing its audience, you.