Journalists are known to attend press conferences. It’s where we learn what’s news, ask questions, network with sources, and sometimes even make friends (fun fact: I met my wife at a press conference).

I recently found out that many students participate in press conferences too, but not the kind familiar to the working press.

In DepEd parlance, “school press conferences” are student competitions in various skills important to the journalism profession. It’s a tradition that goes back to the 1930s and is now mandated by law through the Campus Journalism Act of 1991.

It’s now a big deal, as I found out when I was a speaker at the opening of the Calabarzon regional schools press conference hosted by Lipa, Batangas earlier this week.

Accompanied by their teachers and school advisers, hundreds of elementary and high school students from around the region converged to compete in news and feature writing, photojournalism, radio and TV scriptwriting, and even editorial cartooning. The contestants entered the venue accompanied by a marching band and choreographed folk dancing. It’s the kind of entrance usually associated with star athletes or beauty pageants. But these were nerdy, often awkward writers and artists.

I was told that next to the Palaro, this series of school press conferences, from district to national levels, are the biggest DepEd school activities.

For a journalism lifer like me, who’s been told that our profession is dying — or even better off dead — all this festivity and enthusiasm were bountiful proof of life.

I told them so when it was my turn to speak. I was gratified by the importance given to developing skills needed by journalists of tomorrow.

But I also told them about the sobering reality that our profession faced existential questions. Not a single hand went up when I asked who still reads newspapers. Everyone gets their news online or from television. Journalists must compete for attention with millions of online sources of news of varying degrees of credibility and dubiousness. I came of age when many still read the same newspapers to know what was going on in politics and other sectors of society. No longer does the press function as gatekeepers — a pre-internet conceit. Today, there are no more gates.

Those devoted to demonizing the press might exult at this reality. “Who needs the news media when we have social media?” is the gleeful refrain.

But we still need facts. We still need to know if information is based on evidence. We still need to know when and where a storm is coming. We still need to know what red flags lurk in a government budget.

We can still hope to get all this from journalists, who presumably have the training and commitment to ferret out and present facts for the common good. It warmed a geezer’s heart to see the audience of aspirants stand up to recite a “journalist’s creed,” where they vowed to be “stoutly independent, constructive, and always respectful of readers but always unafraid.”

But I also sought to de-romanticize the occasion by saying that only a few will eventually appear on camera; most will actually work at equally worthy but less glamorous jobs behind the camera as news managers, producers, camerapersons, researchers, and so on. They too are journalists. Even more will be online editors and reporters.

Most of those in Lipa competing to qualify for the national press conference won’t even become professional journalists affiliated with bona fide media companies and organizations.

Many will instead choose to become self-employed “content creators” or influencers seeking to build followings for monetization. They will not identify as journalists, yet their followers will look to them for information, news, and even guidance.

So, I modestly proposed this to my audience: Whether or not you will identify as a journalist, why not adopt the ethos of journalism — the spirit of truth-loving and fact-finding that’s at the heart of what we do? Why should that ethos be the exclusive domain of those who identify as journalists?

The discipline of verification, the accountability for what you share, the responsibility to be careful, the passion for the common good — why can’t these traits mark the daily practices of influencers and content creators? Journalism can no longer be an exclusive club of those with press IDs.

The future of freedom-loving societies will depend not on the survival of journalism as we’ve known it. The future will hinge more on young people like these embracing the values of journalism, no matter what they end up doing.