“The Displacement Hypothesis is REAL, and I have Firsthand Experience with the Theory…”
By: Keegan Hartman
“Why did you want to chase a career in journalism?”
If I had a dime for every time that I’ve been asked that question, never again would I be burdened with having to pay off my student debt (which, lets just say, it will take a good amount of time for me to fully pay off after my college career at Mizzou).
In all seriousness, though, I knew that I had wanted to [originally] pursue a career in journalism, specifically sports journalism, after taking annual field trips to a local newspaper during my high school career.
A little background, my family currently lives in Joplin, Missouri. Joplin is where I was born and raised. Growing up, I attended the Webb City School District, and eventually graduated from Webb City High School in 2018. However, it was during my time at Webb City, specifically in my sophomore year, when I think I had a grasp on what I wanted to do for my future.
After my high school fad with sports was over- once I found out I pretty much sucked at both football and golf- I pretty much said:
“To hell with this conditioning and “being in shape” crap, what else is there for me?”
Enter, just about every subject you could think of: speech & debate, student council, theatre, and yes… journalism.
It was funny because at the time, my best friend’s mom, was actually the teacher for the journalism class and was the one who overlooked the weekly production/packaging for our school’s paper.
It wasn’t even because I had known Stephany (Mrs. Kelley), and that Grant, my best friend, was planning on being in that class. It was because I knew one of my niches was writing. I was really fascinated with public-speaking and expressing my opinion out loud. Hell, I mean I covered all the bases: public speaking, speech structuring/writing, photography, and videography. I wanted to learn every facet of the industry, because, although I had removed myself from physically playing sports, my love had always been to talk about and stay around sports. But I mean, if you know anything about Webb City, then you know they’re atop of the state of Missouri when it comes to sports such as football. It’s something they eat, sleep, and breathe, and I wanted to maintain that relationship and remain engaged with the sport any way that I could.
Then, obviously, after my physical involvement with Webb City Football, I moved on and quickly got into writing and reporting on our team’s success the year following. And I am not going to lie, Friday nights definitely had a different vibe, but I still was in the thick of the action, writing from the press box, interviewing players and coaches after the game, and assembling packages for each week’s edition of the paper.
Every week seemed to be as stressful as the last. Our journalism class, comprised of only like ten kids (maybe less) worked tirelessly in Adobe InDesign on a weekly basis, formatting stories, from the lead to the tail/op-ed’s of the paper, we each put in the hours to make sure each newspaper copy was better than the last… problem was, although WE took pride in our work, consumption of our content was seemingly ignored by our peers (students + staff).
We tried every tactic. Heck, we even incorporated coupon deals and gift certificates to incentivize our peers to ready our copies. Yet, we had to come to our senses… it was 2015/’16… nobody read print anymore.
But, I mean, could you blame them?
(Remember the part about touring the newspaper building, well, here is that part of my story).
At this point, Mrs. Kelley decided to have us, as an entire team, visit with those who were already in the industry. Those who had experience in writing the articles, composing the questions, formatting the content, and pushing/promoting the content. Mrs. Kelley had graduated as a Communications Major from Pittsburg State University, and in her time with the University, developed many close ties to those who would make a living out of print journalism.
So, with that in mind, we turned to the experts, and this wasn’t a one time deal for our class… rather, it was an annual occurrence. All three years I was apart of journalism, we would take one day and make a field trip to the Joplin Globe building which was quartered off of Main St. in downtown Joplin, MO. There, me and my journalism colleagues would divide up and go speak with those who were experts professionally covering the departments in which we covered for our school. For example, since I covered sports and did photography, some of my day would be spent with the sports journalists who wrote for the paper, and some would be spent with the photo journalists.
These were more so workshops for my classmates and I. Not only were we on a mission to promote and market our content unto our peers, but we also wanted to better our craft with the help of the journalists’ expertise.
Continuously, however, we got the same advice:
“Maybe your school should expand onto a digital platform? And you should push your individual content through social media and its tools…”
And with that advice, it got us thinking,
‘Well, damn… that’s genius -Globe. It’s 2016 (at the time of this) and we continuously seeing an uprise in digital media consumption… why not?’
All these years, the Joplin Globe had made print copies of their content for their consumers. A lot of the stuff on a print copy, however, content was also accessible with the Globe’s new app, which was accessible on most platforms and devices. Although, at the time, the app was still in beta, but there were plans for the newspaper to thrive off of subscriptions.
For us, as a school, you couldn’t really make money for an app, but we figured approaching the school board for a website was good enough. Most of it was driven by the fact that we wanted a database that was comprised of photo, video, and digital content made by the students within journalism. We felt that, after the help of our friends at the Joplin Globe, we could utilize those aforementioned ideas to better push our content into the faces of students. And did we ever?
After the website launched the beginning of my junior year (following its original pitch) we saw an increase in interaction from students around the school. Again, we didn’t just want boring articles with pictures. No, this time, we incorporated videos to better push our content. We added links to coupons and websites for the students, which, in turn, supported local businesses in/around the area. Additionally, we created tag boards on Twitter and Instagram to allow for more interaction with our followers and readers. We put out polls for our students. We asked for weekly opinions, questions on trending topics in and around school. All-and-all, we saw a huge increase in consumption just because we took a leap of faith and transitioned from, what once was, arguably one of the most dominant mediums in all of media.
The “Displacement Hypothesis” begs the question: what happens to our OLD IDEAS when NEW IDEAS take over? Well, from firsthand experience, we kept our old ideas intact, the same approach to structuring our story, the same formatting process, and maintained the same characteristics of a good journalist. However, as brutally honest as it may sound, thanks to computers, phones, tablets, and what have you- newspapers are dead. We are evolving and are we continuing to evolve day-by-day. If there is still a small population of newspapers now… in my opinion, there will be none in the next five-to-ten years thanks to technology’s advantage on consumerism.