Mel Snyder Reading Breakdown

The Mel Snyder reading offers an insightful analysis on the optics on the job market for journalism students. He opens up by providing some of the statistics pertaining to entrepreneurial journalism, noting that the big money is in health care and high tech.

However, for the sake of our class lecture with Mr. Snyder tomorrow, I will focus my efforts on this recap on Snyder’s insights on how to build a career as a freelance writer.

Snyder makes the argument that entrepreneurial journalism can be particularly profitable if you are an expert in a field in which affluent people generally pay good money for content. But, he contests that profits could either take a long time to produce, or not be able to produce at all, since we are living in an era in which people are being overwhelmed with content.

Snyder also talks about the advantages and benefits of marketing yourself, and your work, well. He uses senior-living facilities as an example, explaining how they market their business to senior citizens. This ties into his conversations about the work opportunities that are available for journalism students in these assisted living facilities and in healthcare more broadly.

I appreciated Mr. Snyder’s insights on how to better market oneself in the journalism job market. While his writing seemed to be largely focused on big tech and healthcare, I understand the reasons why. Furthermore, I think his advice will be helpful in navigating an already-bleak job market during a pandemic.