As some of you know I tried out to be the student graduation speaker…didn’t make it. So I figured I subject everyone to my corny speech here. Let me know what you think. (Speech follows after the break.)

The class of 2007 stands at the crossroads of a very exciting time in journalism. Although it is proving to be a scary time, it is also an exciting one. More and more people are interacting with news in different ways. Consumers want more–they always do. And some journalists are beginning to provide more. They are embracing the changes. But not everyone is so excited. Other journalists are getting ready to throw in the towel. They say that the new journalism isn’t as good as the old. That journalism has “lost its guts” as Dan Rather recently pointed out. However, I think our class can embrace and adapt to these changes. And I believe that we are poised to catalyze future changes in our profession.

These past four…maybe five or six years have been years full of change; for us as college students, for the Missouri School of Journalism, and for the journalism industry as a whole. We began as inexperienced freshmen who thought we could make tons of money and fix all the world’s problems simply by exposing them to mature seniors who still want to do the same… we realize now that we just wont make any money doing it. We have mastered the difference between lay and lie and I’m sure someone will come up to me after the ceremony to inform me how many instances of passive voice there were in my speech. I look forward to the emails that I will most certainly receive from Holly Edgell and Maggie Walter.

We’ve changed so much that some of us are taking jobs that we would never had imagined. As a broadcast student I would never have thought about working at a newspaper. Or maybe a better example would be the j-school students who will spend the next year driving around the Weiner Mobile. There are those who came here to be reporters but are now taking jobs as editors and producers, and those who came here to report on topics like social issues but are now reporting on business and economics. After all, “we’re the lucky ones.” Many of our former classmates didn’t make it past freshmen year. But you could also say that we’re the crazy ones. We’re the ones who spend hours debating the merits of using semi colon or a colon. We’re the ones who when there’s a snowstorm get in our two wheel drive cars and drive around town. We’re the ones who spend hours working on a MoJo ad campaign for MoJo’s biggest client…which is MoJo itself. You see maybe we’re crazy or maybe we just adapt to the situation.

Changes at the j-school are also noticeable. You may have seen the new facility being built in the middle of the quad…i’m sorry–adjacent to the quad. Every j-school student has a laptop now. The purpose is so we can take notes during class…and if by taking notes they mean chatting about our professors to other students in the class, then yes having a laptop is very effective. And of course, there’s the addition of a new sequence, media convergence. The other sequences have had their share of change as well. Print students saw a brand new website for both the Missourian and Vox..and quickly learned that it’s not the end of the world if your story is an “online exclusive.” Broadcast students got an opportunity to star in FirstView and what else would bring a smile to someone’s face then being asked to post a blog or web version of their story only after pulling an extended shift at KOMU, and don’t forget to attribute all your quotes.

All of these changes point to a larger transformation that is being seen in the industry. As everything begins to move to the internet, we have two choices. We can fight the change like too many veterans in our industry have tried to do. Or we can prove them wrong. We can take the skills that we have learned at the world’s oldest school of journalism and apply them to the world’s newest type of journalism. We have done a great job these past four years adapting to change; I can’t wait to see what our class will do to continue to transform our industry. Why? Because this graduating class understands that no matter wht the direction journalism takes, we believe in the power of journalism. Congratulations class of 2007!