High school students remain obnoxiously optimistic about journalism’s future

For four days this weekend, the 4,500 visiting students at the Journalism Education Association‘s national conference turned downtown into the biggest spectacle of naive hope in Kansas City outside of opening day at Kauffman Stadium.

As a professional journalist, I considered this a call to assemble the Pitch Action News Team. If left to the daily newsmen, these impressionable children would be forced into unarmed combat with a monument to human sickness. Bitter columnists who actually worry about bloggers and drink, not for fun, but to steady the involuntary tremors. The 43-year-old fetuses curled into protective balls against the next round of layoffs. Dead-eyed girls with mustaches sullenly meditating on biological clocks and toaster cozies, their mouths slick and shiny with drool. Someone had to let them know that this job could be fun! To my great joy, they didn’t need me at all.