Thomas Ritchie has spent many years in the Journalism world and says “It’s not dead it still exists now it’s just a different animal.”

Thomas Ritchie works in corporate marketing which he says, “it’s not sexy by any means”.  As successful as Ritchie is as a marketer his heart and skills will always be in journalism. 

Ritchie started his career at Mount Marty college, now University, with a degree in communications.   From there he went to the adventurous world of Journalism and started working for different papers for the next 20 years.

The largest Paper that Ritchie worked for was the Argus Leader, and that’s when he started talking about the changes in journalism.   Ritchie said that that there were 72 people working for the Argus Leader when he worked there now it’s less than 10.

Ritchie talked about how there was not a lot of support for the paper news industry, lots of people get their news from short form content and social media platforms.  He explained that the people today are not interested or have the time to read a whole story, the people just want the main details in a quick fashion and carry on with their lives.  This is especially true when it comes to the new state of twitter, where anyone can really post anything without repercussion.

Another way that journalism has changed is the amount of opinion pieces that are published.  Ritchie talked about how lots of news today are opinion-based shows, articles, or podcasts that drive a narrative that aren’t always unbiased.

Lastly the Journalism world has to deal with this new form of Ai.  Ai is something that can be used by everyone now and is very easy to access.  Ritchie said, “Ai will take the jobs of people who don’t know how to use it”.

The majority journalist themselves have found themselves outside the journalism world.  Many of them like Ritchie have found their way to the marketing world.  Ritchie said that journalism is similar to marketing when it comes to getting people’s attention and creative writing.

Ritchie told us lots about the “glory days” where journalism was at its peak.  He said it was exciting and “it’s never the same 2 days in a row”.  His favorite memory was a quote a person said after turning 100 saying “smoke cigars and have a lot of sex”.