I poked around online yesterday looking for the proper N400 form, and I ended up perusing some study materials and sample questions for the citizenship test.

I find this sort of thing pretty interesting, so I thought I’d share.

The spelling is of course quite easy for a native English speaker such as myself. And if any of you born-and-raised Americans can’t ace the civics portion, I worry about you.

The sad truth–or shall I say, the sad speculation and educated guess–is that a lot of Americans wouldn’t do well on this test on the first try. How many is “a lot”? Well, that depends. Now that the questions asked are more open-ended than they used to be–with queries like “What does the Constitution do?” replacing old ones like “What is the Constitution?”–lots of news organizations are digging around to see how well various samplings of U.S. citizens perform. (Examples: Fox News; CNN–you can even try your hand at a few questions at MSNBC.)

Out of simple curiosity, I’d love to see all Americans taking the 2010 census also try their hands at the citizenship test. How well do you think our citizenry would perform on average? How well will you do if you take the MSNBC sample test?

Fair is fair: I got a 95% thanks to the question regarding which listed state was not part of the original 13 colonies.

NOTE: This MSNBC test is arguably easier than the actual U.S. citizenship test because candidates for naturalization are given questions in short-answer format as opposed to multiple choice. As such, I recommend you check out the official study materials and sample questions from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Web site.

Addendum: I’ve received several messages and comments from people regarding why they think many Americans would fail the citizenship test on the first go. In summary, they point out that most of the voting public is well beyond the days of elementary and high school civics and therefore shouldn’t be expected to retain historical facts and dates that do not affect them on a daily basis.

While I don’t personally think every American needs to know the number of amendments to the Constitution off the top of his or her heard, I do think other questions on the test are very important: Which branch of government declares war? Who is one of the U.S. senators from your state? Who selects new justices for the U.S. Supreme Court and what powers does the court have?

I think that every single American registered to vote should be able to answer these questions correctly–no excuses.

But is this acceptance of the Web “too little, too late”? In 2008, nearly 16,000 newspaper journalists lost their jobs to layoffs. And so far in 2009, another 3,000 have found themselves out of work. These figures don’t even include television, radio, the struggling magazine sector, or the Internet.

I interviewed writer, public speaker, and founder of the aptly named AngryJournalist.com, Kiyoshi Martinez, last week about our struggling profession. Although Martinez has left the reporting world, he keeps up with the industry as much as he can and is currently developing a new site, Journalism.me, which currently lists the most popular topics journalists are blogging about on any given day. Here are some highlights from the interview:

Rima Chaddha Mycynek: Your brief career in journalism includes a stint as a stringer for Newsweek and as a Web editor for five Chicago-area newspapers–at once. Why did you leave the field?

Kiyoshi Martinez in Chicago, February 2008. Photo courtesy Jason Reblando

Kiyoshi Martinez: Short answer? Money. Long answer? I wanted fair financial compensation, job stability, weekends off, good benefits and a broader range of career opportunities.

RCM: Fair enough. Is that why you started AngryJournalist.com?

KM: I started AngryJournalist after reading a report from Dr. Scott Reinardy on how the burnout rate of young journalists was on the rise. Some of the responses (anonymous) were similar to either my views of the profession or those expressed by friends in the industry. I wondered how universal these thoughts were and what journalists would say if given the platform to anonymously and freely speak their mind. For a site though that hasn’t changed much and required no extra effort by me, I’m satisfied with its results. I saw this project as more or less an experiment that has overperformed my expectations.

I think a lot of people assume that I was an angry journalist. I would say it was more a “disillusioned” or “disappointed” feeling about the industry. I’m not angry now. I’m pretty content with my life, but I do empathize with friends who are still in the industry and being let down by it. I’ve known three close friends who were laid off in the past year, one was my girlfriend. Another was my roommate in [an] internship program. And the other was my bureau chief who mentored me during my [government reporting] internship in Springfield. I think what David Simon’s essay for Esquire nailed it: you can love newspapers, but “a newspaper can’t love you back.”

RCM: Do you think the journalists who visit your site are more angry than disillusioned or vice versa?

KM: I think journalists are transitioning between anger and sadness, especially as we witness more layoffs, shutdowns and general chaos in the industry. Will they quit? Honestly, I think that decision may be made for many of them soon enough.

RCM: That’s pretty ominous, but probably not inaccurate considering the 2008/2009 job-loss figures. Do you think “angry journalists” are more intent on leaving the field now, or are they doing everything they can to keep their positions?

KM: Initially, a year ago, I would’ve said that people were making these threats [to leave their jobs] because they were fed up with management and the general way these companies were being operated. Now, I think it’s shifted to survival. The industry has no financial stability or job certainty. Additionally, all these layoffs are creating a large surplus of experienced talent for the few positions remaining. Then, throw in wage freezes and reductions, hiring freezes and more work on less people. When the odds are this stacked against you, I think that’s a good reason to leave.

RCM: Do you think there’s any hope for print, which seems to be struggling the most out of all media?

KM: I’m a pessimist and realist. It’s going to get worse. There will be less jobs, fewer publications and too little innovation too late (on both business and editorial ends). Watch for more production duties (page design, creative ad services) to be outsourced to India. Expect some publications to have full-time staff replaced by freelancers paid on pageviews. More sections will be dropped from the physical product and the newshole will get smaller. Circulation will drop further, especially in this economy. And there will be fewer print ads, too. All the ad verticals newspapers built their empires on are eroding away right now: auto, real estate, classified, retail, etc.

RCM: Surely you can’t be completely pessimistic. Is there anything at all that you feel we can do to keep professional journalism alive?

KM: A “better” economy aside, the only thing that I believe can be done by news organizations is to have a huge push to innovate when it comes to online advertising and make your services and product more appealing. Don’t pursue any editorial projects that you can’t monetize. Find new revenue streams. I would also stress an emphasis on finding a way to monetize the growth of mobile broadband Internet browsing being done, but I doubt many news orgs right now have the funds to seriously become a player in that market right now, let alone last long enough to take advantage of it.

RCM: That’s a lot to ask, considering that journalistic education nationwide still seems to be focused on the us-versus-them mentality of broadcast-versus-print. I won’t get into how arcane I think that is, but I will ask you this: How can we tweak journalism education make what you suggest possible–or at the very least, to ensure that we’re not sending students out to face a bleak future of unemployment or temp work?

KM: To justify the cost of a journalism degree, it should have business courses training journalists to be entrepreneurs. You have as good a shot in being successful working for yourself as you do for the established companies. This mythical wall between editorial and business needs to come down. This willful ignorance is a huge problem.

I can’t speak for journalism programs around the country, but I think that my undergraduate classes were mostly a waste of time. All the classwork wasn’t as valuable as the experience of actually performing acts of journalism and learning skills by practicing them. This is something you can do outside of a journalism college. You can train yourself and let your peers review you online. There are plenty of free resources to learn about multimedia. However, one class that I think was valuable was media law. Knowing about libel, copyright, the First Amendment rights, etc. was essential and helpful.

One thing that I’d stress is that anyone can perform acts of journalism. Having schooling or training doesn’t matter as much anymore. What matters now is having the tools to distribute information to an audience. One of my favorite journalism-related movie scenes is from “Superman Returns” when the editor of the Daily Planet is screaming at Jimmy Olsen for getting scooped by a kid who snapped a photo of the Man of Steel with his cameraphone.

Four years of schooling, thousands of dollars of student loan debt and a piece of paper doesn’t have anything over the guy with a iPhone and a few hundred followers on Twitter.

What do you think? Is journalism (or at least the journalistic model we’re still teaching in schools) dead? Can we save our profession?

Now, it looks like journalists–once notorious for their distrust of new media and the blogosphere–are finally stepping up and accepting that one can’t be a Walter Cronkite or a Bob Woodward if one’s audience is disappearing. And that’s exactly what’s happening. According to a report last week from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the internet has overtaken newspapers as a leading source of news. Considering the Web’s noticeable jump in popularity even since the 2007 survey, it is not unreasonable to think that television news could be the next victim. Not only does this same survey show television and the internet in a neck-and-neck race for audiences under thirty, but Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that virtually every media sector apart from the internet is slowly losing Americans’ attention.

Each year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism publishes a report on the The State of the News Media. This year’s report includes a survey of 500 journalists on what some fear is a dying profession. Here’s are some of the findings:

Journalists have become markedly more pessimistic about the future of their profession. But their concerns are taking a distinctly new turn. Rather than worrying as much about quality, they are now focused on economic survival. And in that new focus, we see signs of new openness to change.

Journalists are ready — even eager — to embrace new technologies. They think a range of new digital activities, from blogs to citizen media, are good for journalism. They even think, by 2 to 1, that splitting their time across multiple platforms is a positive change rather than a problem that is taking time from their reporting or spreading them thin. These are all attitudes hard to imagine a few years ago.

…

[L]ook inside what journalists say and they are largely optimistic about what technology brings to the craft. When asked to name what in particular they see as the industry’s strengths, those naming adapting to Web more than tripled among national journalists and increased ten-fold among those at the local level. And near the top of the list are two direct results of technology — timeliness and speed. About one in five name these as something the industry is doing especially well.

The emphasis above is mine. My master’s thesis actually focused on media convergence in student, professional, and mixed newsrooms from 2004-2006. I won’t summarize all 157 pages here, but I will note that as objective as I tried to be, my most frustrating finding was that the biggest roadblocks to creating multimedia newsrooms were the journalists themselves. The old rivalries among print and broadcast people were as rabid as ever, and few of the hardliners had any respect for the Web as a medium (or, more accurately, a vessel for media). I found that perplexing. I’ve always been interested in getting my fingers into all media, so what was up with these curmudgeons being so adversarial?

Well, part of the reason was fear. The term “convergence,” which has since fallen out of use and has found its way to buzzword heaven (or hell), has unfortunate ties to failed efforts to force journalists to do things that made them feel uncomfortable. The idea at a lot of these newsrooms was basically, “we want our journalists to be all-in-one reporters!” I don’t need to explain the potential for disaster when you send a reporter out to be his own cameraman during a hurricane, and I doubt I need to explain how scary it is for a lot of writers–no matter how good-looking–to speak into a lens, knowing that there’s no backspace key for a misspoken word.

Managers came to these journalists with nonsensical figures and charts on paper, trying to convince them that by taking on extra tasks they didn’t initially sign up for (or want to do, or know how to do), they would make their media conglomerations’ market shares skyrocket.

It wasn’t a convincing argument.

A lot of reporters quit their jobs in search of papers and stations that would allow them to flourish in their specific crafts.

But now, with the economy at a low and with so many news organizations cutting jobs, reporters have an even greater fear to worry about: their viability in a market saturated with unemployed talent. And while the circumstances for this new-found acceptance of the Web are less than ideal, the push for journalists to educate themselves on new technologies will surely have lasting long-term benefits for both content creators and consumers.

I can’t stress enough the importance of continuing one’s education even when gainfully employed. I’m convinced that my side-projects during graduate school are what got me my first “real job,” a great gig as a multimedia journalist for an internationally broadcast TV show. And now that this position has ended, I’m equally convinced that it was not just my work there but also my side-projects here and elsewhere that brought me the chance to teach multimedia journalism at Boston University starting this spring.

Over the next few months, I intend to learn more about the development aspect of multimedia journalism (specifically ActionScript and other elements of Flash). How about you?