Students are writing off journalism degrees. It's a mistake. | Opinion

On May 4, the Pulitzer Prizes recognized the very best in American journalism. Yet even as the industry celebrates its highest achievements, public confidence in the press is collapsing.

Gallup recently found that only about a third of Americans trust the news media to report fully and fairly – a historic low.

It is widely understood that Americans distrust the media. The phrase “fake news,” once a fringe term, has entered everyday vocabulary as a shorthand for that distrust.

I worked professionally as a journalist for several years and now lead the Collegiate Network at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a journalism program that trains conservative and independent-minded undergrads and early-career journalists.

Over the past several years, I’ve observed that the crumbling trust in media is likely tied to a structural problem: a widening disconnect between the people producing the news and the people it is supposed to serve.

Talented students discouraged from journalism careers

The undergraduate students who run our network of more than 90 student newspapers are capable, smart and in genuine pursuit of the truth. However, I’ve increasingly found that many of the most capable and ambitious young people are choosing not to enter journalism as a long-term profession.

The reasons are not hard to understand. The industry is marked by financial instability and declining newsroom resources. For talented students weighing their futures, journalism appears too risky, so they opt for more stable careers in law, finance or tech.

That calculation may be changing. The same disruption creeping into newsrooms is now reshaping the very fields students have been fleeing to.

Law firms are cutting associate positions as artificial intelligence handles document review and legal research. Finance is automating the entry-level analytical work that once built careers. Tech is contracting.

Artificial intelligence can't do everything

AI is quite good at processing information, but what it cannot do is knock on doors, cultivate reluctant sources or earn the trust of communities over time. Those happen to be the core skills of working reporters.

This is not a minor distinction. The investigative and on-the-ground reporting that holds institutions to account requires human intuition and judgment that AI cannot replicate.

It can summarize documents or comb through vast data, but it cannot navigate a hostile interview, read a room or decide what the real story is. There is a reason that readers still return to seminal journalists like Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe decades later.

Their work was deeply reported and perceptive, crafted with insight about American society during periods of profound cultural upheaval. It’s difficult to imagine that kind of journalism becoming automated.

Without a steady influx of talented, intellectually serious journalists who can represent perspectives in the corporate media’s blind spot, efforts to rebuild credibility will likely not succeed. But reversing this trend requires actively rebuilding journalism talent pipelines in a way that motivates young journalists to see it as worthwhile, viable and aspirational.

Good journalism requires a human touch

The Collegiate Network is confronting this challenge by launching a news aggregator that brings together the best work from our affiliated campus newspapers, alongside the work of our fellows, interns and alumni – a centralized, curated hub prioritizing original reporting.

Universities are not isolated bubbles. They are testing grounds for cultural, institutional and even economic change.

Debates that play out in lecture halls today often show up in boardrooms, courtrooms and legislatures tomorrow. Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, first contested on campuses, are now central issues in corporate governance and state-level policymaking.

Debates over free speech and campus disinvitation in the mid-2010s moved from student protests into state legislation and corporate speech policies.

While students might not have the experience to report from war zones or serve as seasoned political commentators, they are experts of the campus beat. When campus reporting is strong, the public gains earlier, clearer insight into the debates that could eventually affect them.

The aggregator also changes incentives for the student journalists themselves. When reporters can see what their peers are uncovering nationwide, they are pushed to pursue more ambitious stories that might otherwise remain local or underdeveloped.

One of the newspapers the Collegiate Network supports, The Stanford Review, conducted several months of interviews and research for a May 2025 report alleging that Chinese government-linked actors had engaged in sustained academic espionage efforts at Stanford, targeting students and research.

In March, the editor of the Review and one of the report’s authors, Elsa Johnson, testified before a congressional committee, where Johnson described her experience being targeted and later harassed by individuals linked to the Chinese Communist Party after exposing espionage tactics on campus.

This was not the work of an algorithm, nor was it a story with implications limited to campus life.

By creating a platform where strong student work is visible and connected to real professional opportunities, the aggregator helps make journalism a more attractive path for high-achieving students.

If the best students continue to opt out of journalism, the profession will continue to decline in both quality and trust. A generation of students was told that journalism was risky compared with other professions.

AI is now scrambling that premise. In doing so, it’s proving that the skills at the heart of serious reporting – earning trust, digging for truth and telling stories that endure – are becoming harder to replicate, not easier.

Curious and talented students with a knack for critical thinking and a desire to make sense of a complicated world shouldn't write off journalism. It may be the most durable career on the table.

Marlo Slayback is the executive director of the Collegiate Network for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.