By Nick Rhodes

With the rapid expansion of the Internet and technology, all career fields are expecting changes. Journalism is no exception.

The eighth annual Richard G. Wilson Journalism Alumni Symposium plans to discuss just that, with this year’s topic being, “The Future of News.”

The symposium will be held Tuesday at 6 p.m. in the W.T. Young Library auditorium. Mike Farrell, UK journalism professor, organized the symposium.

“The purpose is to help journalism students realize that while there are fewer jobs, there are still jobs,” Farrell said. “While big papers are closing, jobs are still available in smaller markets, such as weeklies and business papers.”

The panel is composed of five UK graduates: Mark Boxley, the assistant city editor and night breaking reporter at the Daily Times in Maryville, Tenn.; Lance Williams, editor of the Nashville Business Journal;  Virginia B. Edwards, president of Editorial Projects in Education and editor-in-chief of Education Week and edweek.org;  Jenay Tate, publisher  of three Virginia newspapers, The Coalfield Progress, The Post in Big Stone Gap and The Dickenson Star in Clintwood; and Tara Pachmayer, the symposium’s moderator and sports anchor and reporter at WKRC-TV in Cincinnati, Ohio.

“These are people who not so long ago were sitting where students are now, they provide experience and opportunities to students,” Farrell said.

The symposium honors Richard G. Wilson, interim director of the School of Journalism and

Telecommunications from 2002 to 2003, the years in which the symposium was established.

Beth Barnes, director of the School of Journalism and Telecommunications, said the speakers are seeing real-world evidence of those transformations.

“The thing of most interest to journalism students specifically, but also to students outside the school, is that these are people out in the field experiencing the changes,” Barnes said.