I see that one of the professionals doesn't like it when the little people get involved in journalism - opinion or otherwise. Here's The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten, warning a bunch of J-School graduates about the dangers they face:

My point is, this is a challenging time for journalists.

And because you are word people, you understand that "challenging time" is a euphemism often used to describe disasters of epic proportions. For example, Richard Pryor was facing a "challenging time" when he ran down the street half-naked and on fire.

What are your challenges, specifically? Let us begin with, quote unquote, getting a job. Good jobs in journalism have become scarce as newspapers shrink and die, broadcast media fragment to smaller niche audiences and the public appears more and more willing to receive its "news" online from nincompoops ranting in their underpants.

Now, Weingarten is a humorist for the Post, so some of this is tongue in cheek. A lot of it likely isn't though - people in his position - i.e., those who are paid to produce interesting opinions - are the ones facing the "nincompoops", as he puts it.

This is an area that vast swaths of the media haven't really grasped yet - punditry is no longer an exclusive little club. The op/ed page of a major daily was a major perch a decade ago - now, not nearly so much. It turns out that there are a lot of people willing - and happy - to produce opinion pieces regularly, and do so mostly for the satisfaction of making their point publicly. That's a major problem for those paid to produce 1-5 columns a week. Many bloggers put out that much content every day. Opinion journalism has shifted.

Why do I say that a lot of the media hasn't gotten that? Well, look at the New York Times. What do they charge for? Access to their pundits. Why they think those people are worth charging for is a mystery to me - and it has nothing to do with their politics. I can find equally (or more) incisive content freely available, from exactly the same political perspective. Why would I pay to read it?

Then there's the all too common practice of locking the archives behind a pay wall. The net result of that is to make anything in the Times (or other pubs with the same policy) effectively unlinkable. Why should I link to something that will disappear within a few weeks? If someone finds a link to one of my posts 3 months from now, any link over to a Times article lwill lead to a black hole. I don't know if this is a generational problem, or just a refusal to grasp the obvious. Either way, it's a problem.

Going back to the humor piece, here's the advice I'd give the J-School types - get a real job first. Learn something about how the world works before you try to be an observer of it.