That’s what I discovered at career day at my old high school last week. More than 80 girls from St. Mary’s Academy in Portland, Oregon, listened to me and two other alums talk about writing careers on one of more than a dozen panels presented during the day.

I had the unhappy job of informing them career options for journalism graduates today aren’t anything they”re likely to see on TV. With newspapers and magazines laying off staff by the thousands and people getting more of their news online, the industry is changing completely.

That doesn’t mean there are no opportunities, I explained. There will always be some newspaper and magazine jobs. But there will be even more opportunities elsewhere, at Web-based publishers, trade magazines, community papers, etc. Heck, even Rory Gilmore ended up writing for a Website.

The key, I suggested, is to learn the basics, keep up with the latest tech skills, get experience interning and be flexible. In hard times like these when you’re just starting out and jobs are scarce, where you work isn’t as important as the opportunities you have to put your education into practice. Finding a mentor or someone you can shadow is another great way to see what a job’s like from the inside out.

In preparation for my talk, I asked some other journalist friends on Twitter what advice they had for students thinking of journalism careers. Here’s what they said:

– RUN AWAY!!!!

– Just tell them the truth. Things are really tough now, so they’ll have to be entrepreneurial.

– There’s still work as a journalist and it’s still a noble profession, despite what they may hear. The thing that drives young journos is a passion for the ability to make change. That’s still possible!

– It’s a tech career. That you should want to be your own boss. That you should be able to put up a site from scratch.

– It’s not for the thinned skin, and it’s not cut out for everyone. It’s not a 9 to 5 job, either.

Besides wanting to know about jobs, students asked a lot of questions about the writing process and what it’s like to be a freelancer. How do you find time to write? How do you keep yourself from getting distracted? How do you get motivated when you have to write about boring stuff? Do you write stories and then find someplace to buy them? How do you get assignments from national magazines? In a way it’s comforting to know that the questions 15- and 16-year-olds ask are the same ones veteran freelancers ask themselves all the time.

A couple students wanted to know about being editors – what do they do, and how do you get that kind of job? My answer: editors are essentially managers, coordinating reporters and assignments. They have to be organized, communicate well and grasp the big picture but also be detailed-oriented so things don’t fall through the cracks. I’ve worked as an editor before, and if you aspire to be an editor, I’d say start by working as a writer so you know what it takes. That way when you’ll have realistic expectations of what reporters can do and you’ll have more credibility with your staff.

No, it’s not the best time to be headed to journalism school or looking for a job as a reporter or editor. But it wasn’t when I started my career either. If you want it enough, you can make it happen. Spending the day with a roomful of students enthusiastic about the profession convinced me of that.

Bottom line: you don’t need a degree to get work as a writer.

Even if you have no professional journalism experience, j-school isn’t the only answer.

I’ve been there. In college I was editor of the student newspaper but my degree was in English literature, so I went to journalism grad school because I thought I needed “real” training. After a year, I realized a masters in journalism was for people who had absolutely no previous experience writing or wanted to be an academic.

I was neither – and struggling to support myself. So after a year I quit and got a job at as a trade magazine writer and editor (there was a recession, entry-level newspaper jobs were non-existent). Many years later, after I’d worked as a weekly and then daily newspaper reporter and then as a freelance writer, I went back to grad school – as the professor. I taught online newswriting to grad students. My only qualifications were those years I’d spent practicing the craft.

So if you’re contemplating going back to school to give your writing career a kick in the pants, there are other ways:

If you’re already writing, stick with it. Find some regular gigs – it is possible in this economy. If you have very little experience, you may need to start small and work your way up – and in these days of Craigslist writing jobs and Web content producers, there are lots of opportunities for starting small.

Blog. There’s no substitute for writing day in and day out. If you don’t want to maintain your own blog, find one on a subject you’re interested in and pitch a few blog posts. I don’t ordinarily advocate writing for free, but if you’re just starting out, you’ve gotta prove to somebody you can do the work – but then move on. And if you’re already established, hunt for paid gigs, they’re out there.

If you’re worried about your skills being out of date, there’s an abundance of non-degree track classes on using multimedia in journalism you can take online or in person. Organizations like the Knight Digital Media Center and News University offer scholarships or cover part of the expense. Take lots of them, and while you’re at it, do a lot of networking so you meet people who could potentially open doors for you.

Find someone with the job you’d like to have some day. Follow them on Twitter. Invite them to connect with you on LinkedIn. If they live in the same town you do, invite them to lunch. Ask them to mentor you. Don’t become a stalker. Do soak up as much knowledge as they’re willing to impart – then when you’ve got your writing business up and running pay it forward to some other acolyte.

Yes, getting a master’s degree could give you some official validation in the profession, and not having that might bug you in some deep down part of your being, a lot like the way that it still bothers me. But you don’t need it. Just go do it.

Well, that’s nothing compared with the changes happening in the news business now. Print is out. Digital is in. Newspapers are suffering, online publications flourishing.

While some people lament these changes, others see opportunity. One of them is John S. Carroll, former editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times. Carroll spoke of the changes facing the news business to journalism students at the University of Kentucky on April 1, 2008, saying, “The current period in journalism is, in fact, historic. It is epochal. It is remarkable, perhaps even unprecedented. I’m speaking, of course, of the passage of journalism into the digital age.”

He told journalism students that they’ll be working with tools unlike any imagined by earlier generations:

“You will have new tools for finding things out, and tools to send your stories to the entire world at the speed of light,” he says. “Journalism has always been a one-way bulletin from journalist to public. Now it is a conversation with millions of participants, which gives us access to new facts and new ideas.”

And he expressed hope that new media will continue in the journalistic tradition of:

“enriching the national conversation, keeping the old media honest and creating entirely new languages of journalism. I also hope that they’ll find ways to make more money and thereby to employ reporters in meaningful numbers.”

Read the complete text of John Carroll’s speech here.