Michelle Jaconi: a Bright Future in Journalism

Journalism may be dying; journalism may be on its last leg; there is no future for profitable reporting.

These are the lines that student journalists hear constantly, and for a budding journalist this dreary outlook is never motivating. It makes you question why in gods name you picked journalism in the first place.

Amid all the forlorn attitudes and the layoffs, sometimes there is a glimmer of hope. It may be hard to see past the bluster, but when you find that reassurance it almost makes the daily grind of interviews, long days on the Hill, or HTML coding worth the headache.

Michelle Jaconi, executive producer of CNN’s John King USA, was not the likely candidate for a political journalist. She did not come from a connected family or attend a private school with the future forerunners for the Democratic presidential nomination.

She attended a public school in California that was soon closed after her graduation due to lack of state funding. She said the meager funds the state had were being pumped into low-income areas where metal detectors were a priority.

She was an above average, public school student with a knack for asking “why?” who wound up at Georgetown, found her niche in political journalism and has been successful ever since.

She has been lucky enough to produce for shows like Meet the Press and State of the Union. She has worked for journalists who honed their craft and really researched their topic.

She said one of the things she wonders some times, being what she called “one of Tim Russert’s girls,” if she over-researched things too much. But it all comes from a passion for what she does.

She is a mom and a wife, yet she works 12 hours a day on a regular workweek. She says you can’t be the best journalist, wife, mom and friend at the same time and to expect that is not realistic.

You just have to be the best you can be. Part of that means being right.

One piece of advice she gave to the room of budding journalists was to always be right. Many times young people want to be first on the scoop, but she said that the combination of being right and being first is more important and will serve you well.

So what good is being right when there is no money or no audience to listen?

She works for a company that gets slammed in the media for falling behind MSNBC and FOX News, but she has a bright outlook on the future of journalism at CNN.

While CNN may struggle in primetime, they are doing quite well online. During the daytime they also do well. She gave a much more complex, but wide ranging picture of the state of journalism.

She made the future sound like the possibilities are endless for those who are willing to work hard and who strive to do their best for their company and their sources. They must also strive to do their best for their audience.

There is a world outside the journalism and more specifically the political journalism bubble. And it is not a world that is closing in as fast as we might think.

It was refreshing to know that sometimes, the clouds are not as grey and do not hang as low as they might seem.