College journalists who haven’t entered the workforce yet have been trained to fear the very worst after they’ve secured a diploma, but Rich Gordon sees a much cheerier picture.

According to Gordon, a professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, the modern era of journalism should be defined as a changing job market rather than a shrinking one.

“All is not lost,” Gordon said in a Skype interview with our Power Journalism class last week. “As jobs in newspapers decline, opportunities for all kinds of other platforms are growing.”

My association with the changing nature of the newspaper has always been a negative one. After all, I go to school to learn about print journalism, I practice print journalism, and my dream to be a classical music critic can only exist if print newspapers hang in there. But now I have hope. There are other, equally rewarding ways to earn a salary, like starting a classical music blog, freelancing or working for an online arts publication.

Gordon’s predictions come from the fates of other companies like Kodak, companies who may have lost out in the transition to digital but who reinvented themselves to fit into the 21st century.

“If you go to their website right now, you’ll see that they’re hiring,” Gordon said. “Not for the jobs they had 10 years ago, for different kinds of jobs.”

But in case you were so brightened by Rich Gordon’s news that there’s no longer any need to worry, think again: as the newspaper must reinvent itself, the new wave of journalists must do so too.

These days, Gordon said, “Every journalist needs to be able to create content in multiple forms on multiple platforms.” Translation: don’t know how to work a video camera? Learn. Never had to take your own pictures while interviewing people on assignment? Get used to it. Never recorded interviews with the intention of actually posting them for audiences to listen to? Too bad.

Knowledge of multiple forms of media is a must, but the most valuable skill a journalist can have is knowledge of all things computers: HTML, videomaking programs, networking and more.

Computer literacy is, in fact, so valuable in the modern newsroom that Northwestern’s journalism school has just introduced a nine-month program in which computer science majors work with journalism graduate students to learn about the media industry. According to Gordon, when these computer whizzes graduate, they’ll all be a shoo-in for any Web design job at a major newspaper.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work quite as well the other way around. A journalist like me, who has next to no experience with Web design or computer programming, could never learn everything I’d need to know in a tech job at a newspaper in nine months. Still, Gordon might have talked me into buying a copy of “HTML for Dummies” to get a leg up on the competition.