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Rumor has it that the journalism industry is going straight down the toilet.

If that were true, it wouldn’t bode very well for my future, given that I have spent my college career at UCLA working 50- and 60-hour weeks at the Daily Bruin instead of cultivating the perfect grade point average and sucking up to professors to get a glowing letter of recommendation.

It seems like every other week a new study comes out trying to hammer home the message that young people just don’t read newspapers like they used to. (Or vote, for that matter – we’re a disappointing demographic.)

Newspaper circulation and advertising revenue is not what it used to be. That includes the Daily Bruin.

Many of you who do pick up The Bruin regularly are just tearing out the crossword puzzle or the Sudoku and throwing the rest of the paper on the floor of your lecture hall. Don’t think I don’t see you – I blame you for the fact that my Daily Bruin stipend evens out to something like $2 an hour, and it’s an exciting week in my apartment when I can afford meat.

But I’m just as guilty. I’m a journalism junkie. I follow media law cases and have a nerd-crush on the Los Angeles Times’ car columnist – and even I canceled my print subscription to The Times.

Granted, the decision took careful consideration – of the growing pile of unread issues in the corner of my dining room and the looks I was getting from my roommates.

It would be wrong to say that I wasn’t getting my daily dose of news. I was reading most of the print edition when it went online the night before. If I even took the print edition out of its bag, admittedly it was to do the Sudoku while I ate my morning English muffin.

It’s true that young people don’t read newspapers like we used to. We aren’t dedicated readers and daily print subscribers. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t still getting the news.

We get RSS feeds of our favorite blogs. We have National Public Radio podcasts on our iPods. We’re reading The New York Times, but it’s on a BlackBerry instead of with our morning coffee. And Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert aren’t our only sources of news, though we do like them.

If UCLA students are any indication, we aren’t exactly the uniformed and uninterested age group we’re made out to be.

For every Facebook campaign issue like “Abolish crocs” or “Christopher Walken for president,” there are a dozen groups in support of candidates and ballot measures or calling attention to real issues students are passionate about.

We care about Darfur, affirmative action and gay marriage. We care about the war on terror – we’re the demographic that’s fighting it. We care about student fees, and we care about what our political leaders say and do, from the university to national level and everywhere in between.

Every time you turn around, there’s a new movement on campus for an issue you didn’t even know existed. With the upcoming midterm elections, campus will morph into a microcosm of political activism.

The decline of traditional newspaper readership isn’t exactly the awareness epidemic it’s portrayed to be. The media isn’t going anywhere – we’re just taking on new forms of information dissemination. Journalists aren’t an endangered species. We’re merely an evolving one.

Dudley is the 2006-2007 managing editor. She’s only slightly embarrassed that the first news source she checks in the morning is Defamer.