Jay Bookman, a lead columnist for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution (AJC), recently spoke to Journalism 2 students at North Atlanta. His visit on March 7 to journalism teacher Jack Stenger’s class, was an in-class press-conference about the direction the newspaper industry is taking.

Bookman grew up in a military family. He went to 12 different schools in a span of 12 years and studied at schools in Germany, Italy and Japan. He attended college at Pennsylvania State University where he majored journalism. After graduating he secured first jobs at newspapers in Las Vegas and Washington State. He has been a columnist for the AJC since 1990.

From a young age, Bookman knew he wanted to become a journalist. “I visited a newspaper office with my third grade class. I thought, ‘People pay you to write and give your opinions? Sign me up for this,’” he said.

Bookman is the paper’s liberal-leaning columnist and he writes on politics and government and most recently has written columns skewering Republican candidate Donald Trump. Bookman also has his own blog on the AJC website. Students in Stenger’s class benefitted from hearing from a seasoned journalistic pro. “It was extremely interesting to get insight from a professional,” said sophomore Adam Flores.

Bookman spoke on the future of newspapers and how the journalism field works. He stated that newspaper journalism, his major, and video journalism used to be completely different. Now a newspaper journalist needs to know how to take, edit, publish videos to the newspaper’s website. “Each career goes hand in hand now. There is no longer a large divide,” said Bookman.

Bookman, the AJC and newspaper journalism as a whole have come to the conclusion that newspaper is dying out. The audience for newspapers is thin and the next generation might not even experience newspapers at all. “The new mindset of the AJC is that we are a web publication with a newspaper side business. In 10 years, newspapers will not exist anymore,” said Bookman.