What will the future hold for high school TV when every kid becomes a broadcaster, whether they are in your class or not? Let’s face it, many of them already are going outside the confines of our classroom structure to get their videos “out there” for anyone and everyone to see. Youtube has forever changed the rules of the game, and as high school broadcast teachers, we better figure out what to do about it, or what to do with it.

How big is Youtube? Consider this: According to the latest “Shift Happens” report, conducted in conjunction with The Economist, more video was uploaded to Youtube in the last two months than if NBC, CBS and ABC had been airing new content 24/7/365 since 1948.

The number of unique visitors to NBC, CBS and ABC each month is 10 million, collectively. Youtube, Facebook and MySpace get 250 million unique visitors each month. None of those sites existed six years ago. What will it be like in another six years?

Other things we need to know as we walk into the classroom today:

*The average teen sends 2,272 text messages each month
*Newspaper circulation is down 7 million in the last 25 years.
*In the last five years, unique readers of online newspapers are up by 30 million
*In February of 2008, John McCain raised 11 million dollars for his presidential bid. In that same time period, Barack Obama attended NO fundraisers. Instead, he raised $55 million via online social networks.

If those things seem unrelated, we need to look closer. Everything about the way we send and receive information has been turned inside-out in the last five years.

The deep implications convergence has for our broadcast journalism classes goes beyond just building a website to feature your daily announcements, produced under the watchful eye of the teacher. It won’t be long before the most popular student-produced programs in the nation have nothing to do with the school’s broadcasting department. Don’t believe me? Search Youtube and see how many teen-produced videos, not filtered by adults, are already generating plenty of traffic. More people see teen videos on Youtube in an hour than will see your show in a month, maybe even a year.

Remember how teaching reading “across the curriculum” was all the rage ten years ago? Now the question is, can we afford to not teach “broadcasting across the curriculum” in the near future? If we don’t instill some standards, and create a new culture of media literacy that includes training teens as soon as they walk into our high schools, then we better prepare to sit back and watch Youtube fill up with student-produced content that will pay no heed to standards or ethics of any kind.