Hi, my name is Ashleigh and I am a journalism student.

“Hi Ashleigh”.

 

I am addicted to journalism. I get my fix from my laptop, my high from public praise and my comedown from my personal critique. There are worse things to be addicted to sure, but this is a public and not so secret addiction.

Even now as you are reading this, you are judging my sentence structure, my flow of words or wondering why I am a journalist student in this world of technology. I have been told, too many times to count, that I am studying a ‘dying profession’. That in ten years journalists will be replaced with robots that upload news live to the internet obliterating the need for journalists.

Studying journalism in the age when anyone can have a blog, upload a video or share a status to the masses it’s easy to give in to the little voice inside your head that says: ‘Am I good enough to stand out’? And sure, maybe one day I’ll end up in a Starbucks using the change I found under the couch to pay for my caramel latte and think: ‘I should have been a lawyer’.

But nothing will compare to the feeling of my fingers blurring because I’ve finally broken my writer’s block or being the first to question a politicians motives. I am a journalist student because I was born a journalist. Every decision I have made in my life has pointed, with a big old light up sign, to journalism.

I may never make as much as a lawyer but rest assured that I won’t work a single day of my life because I’m doing what I love, even if a robot wrote it first.

So yes, I am a journalism student and I’m proud of my addiction.