Being a senior in high school, there is no question I receive more often than, “What do you want to do with your life?”

It’s a hard question for anyone my age to answer, but oddly enough, I’ve had an answer at the ready since I joined the Midway my freshman year. I want to be a journalist. 

I say it with a shiny, naïve smile to any adult who deigns to ask me the question — and I can then guess their response with about 99.9% accuracy. I’m almost tempted to mouth the words while they say them: “You know, it’s a real scary time to be going into that.”

They mean it kindly. It’s usually said with a sympathetic tilt of the head, mourning a choice I haven’t even made yet — and they wouldn’t exactly be wrong. In 2023 alone, more than 2,600 journalists in the U.S. lost their jobs due to layoffs. One-fifth of Americans now live in “news deserts,” places with little or no local reporting. And globally, the dangers are even starker: since the war in Gaza began, at least 220 journalists have been killed covering the conflict.

But what those sympathetic head-tilts and worried comments miss is that these crises don’t mean journalism is dying. The billionaires who use papers as megaphones to spread their narratives while silencing opposition, politicians who call the press an “enemy of the people,” the algorithms that spread misinformation — they all benefit from telling us that real reporting is over, and that the only thing left to do is scroll. This isn’t a death knell for real journalism — it’s a strategy. 

There has never been a better time to be a journalist than right now. Not because it’s safe or easy — because it’s neither — but because the stakes are so high. When the truth is constantly under attack, reporting it stops being a job and instead becomes a form of resistance. 

The irony is that we romanticize past eras of reporting — think Watergate, muckrakers, Spotlight — as if they happened in some mythical golden age. But those moments were dangerous, too. They seem heroic in hindsight because the people doing the work refused to quit or get scared — and what’s happening now is no different. The tools have changed and the crises have shifted, but the objective is the same: to hold power to account in real time. 

The well-meaning adults warning me off this career are right about one thing: it is a scary time to be a journalist. But it should be. Because, after all, a world where journalism is comfortable is a world where journalism isn’t doing its job.