I'm not here to dispense advice on how to live your life or plan your career. There's more than enough of that going around, and frankly, I haven't been in this business long enough to have earned the right to dispense it. Instead, I'd like to offer a bit of a counter-narrative to Felix Salmon's treatise on why young people should avoid getting into journalism at practically all costs, because I believe he's gravely wrong and I fear that he'll scare wonderful people away from the career that has given me almost everything that I have today.

My job has changed dramatically since I published my first post on Engadget nine years ago. That's due in part to my own career growth — I've gone from a junior blogger, to a senior blogger, to an editor, to a founding editor of The Verge — but it's also due to the dramatic changes that have shaken the media industry over that near-decade. Actually, let me back up: "shaken" isn't the right word. The media industry has morphed. It's as strong as ever, but the strengths have shifted. In 2006, the line between "blogging" and "journalism" was a bright one that was rarely crossed, and blogs consisted almost exclusively of short blurbs of text presented in a linear format. Today, digital-native writers tell immersive, media-rich stories in the same space as the most hallowed names in journalism. Indeed, "to snowfall" is to create beautiful, interactive longform in the vein of The New York Times' 2012 story, "Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek."

Point being, I don't understand — nor have I ever understood — the narrative that journalism is a dying business. That's a little like saying that the notion of paying money to get a ride is a dying business: that's hogwash, unless you refuse to acknowledge the existence of Uber. The landline telecommunications business is dying, if you conveniently forget the internet.

Times change, methods change, mindsets change. That's not just true for journalism, it's true for quite literally every industry on the planet. No one is safe from change, nor should they be. Adaptability is part and parcel of having a career. Granted, as journalists, we're particularly skilled at observing and waxing philosophical about our own predicament, but the predicament is not unique to us.

And sure, as Salmon suggests, perhaps a little luck helps you land a job and turn it into a fruitful career. But I'd also argue that the luck is fungible: it can be partially or almost completely replaced by hustle and skill. (My colleague Ezra Klein does a great job of laying that out.)

Basically, don't let a guy you don't know on the internet tell you not to get into journalism. (For one thing, he's never worked for Vox Media, and I can assure you that it's good here.) Yes, the headwinds are strong: legacy publications struggle to survive, local and regional media is a shell of what it once was, and the technology of simply reporting a story changes by the week. But I know journalism has a future, because I see it every day in my colleagues, my competitors, and in my own work.

I wouldn't trade it for anything.