Glen Martin pops your bubble

 It’s hard to ignore what Glen Martin said in the first 20 minutes of his speech. He was our first guest speaker in Florangela’s writing for mass communication class and we were ready to get some tips on how to be better writers, but instead we learned how an old school journalist struggles to support himself in the new social media era.

 “I’m poised with my own petard,” he said as he confessed he doesn’t read daily newspapers anymore. Glen said the newspaper industry has gone down since the launch of craigslist and with it many journalists like himself struggle to find a full time job in the new social media. Although he manages to get enough freelance jobs, he sharply admitted, “I will not necessarily recommend [this] as a career path for you.”

 A good writer needs to have more abilities than just “to blog other bloggers,” he said. He is convinced the essential writing skills in up and coming journalists are eroding. He compared the new social media as the partisan newspapers of the late 1700, in which they were highly opinionated. “They spewed venom at each other and now we’ve gone back to that tradition,” he said. Students are being trained to write for the social media and not focused on producing content, conducting an interview or double-checking their own reporting.

Glen’s advice to become a good writer was simple: write everyday and read good writers, but won’t guarantee you are going to make a living as a writer.