I've got a lot of work to do....

I just spent the better part of the last two hours Twitterizing and RSS-ing myself. And yes, I just turned those into verbs. If Google can do it, then by golly, so can I....

I also spent the better part of the last two hours realizing how completely and utterly unmarketable and far behind I am in the journalism world. Seriously, I'm going to be putting on my journalist cap in eight months, and I don't know squat.

Twitter wasn't a word in my personal dictionary until March of this year when my API conference in D.C. was "twittered" by Steve Buttry. I sat next to the online developer for the Houston Chronicle who introduced me to Google Reader and RSS feeds. But I had no idea what they were. I had no idea how to use them. (I honestly still don't, but now at least I'm learning!) I've had four internships at this point with four great newspapers and I'll have had a fifth by the time I graduate, but yet I'm still unprepared to enter the industry with guns blazing. How did this happen? Why am I just now getting my hands dirty in the online community?

A few possibilities:

1. My J-school professors are all curmudgeons. Well, not all of them. I've had two amazing professors who encouraged blogging and the importance of online journalism, and both helped me score ridiculously beneficial internships, including the one that I wrote about this summer.

However, the rest of my professors were way behind and a waste of my time (and lots of money!). Instead of requiring us to write as much as we could, expanding our basic journalistic skills, letting us extensively explore examples of important cases that have affected media and accentuating the ever-growing importance of digital media in the industry, professors kept us busy with true/false tests, assignments that gave us no sense of accomplishment and pica sticks.

The peak of my frustration arrived when, in response to a paper in which I emphasized the importance of knowing and catering to your audience, no matter who they are, my professor told me I was wrong. WRONG. "We cover what's newsworthy. Audience doesn't and shouldn't matter. News is news - there's nothing you can do to change that." Maybe I'm too forward-thinking, but I believe that the "news" has become information and vice versa. Our job as journalists is to inform - through whatever medium necessary, with whatever resources we can get our hands on, and by personalizing everything - so that an individual can get what he needs when he needs it. That's our job. And in this innovative environment, the absolute worst thing that you can tell a journalist is that she's wrong.

2. Things are still evolving. It's hard for newspapers to know which ideas are gold and which aren't. It's hard to advocate for something when you don't know its outcome. We can't predict the future. Journalists are afraid to pass along information and publicize ideas because the risk of failure is high. But we can't play the game without the pieces. It's important to give us (young journalists) as much information as possible so that we can sort through it and determine what's important. Think of the future of journalism as a garden and we're the gardeners. We have to know every type of weed as well as every type of crop so that when the time comes to weed our garden, we'll know what stays and what goes.

3. I'm scared, too. I have no experience in the digital world. I've never been a techie by any means. I know enough HTML to get by and I have a blog, but there's so much out there that I haven't learned. And I have to learn it fast. And since I have to teach myself, it's all up to me and the effort I'm willing to put into my own education. Up until now, I haven't really had the motivation and courage that I'll need to take on a task like this. But now? Now, I'm more determined than ever.