There aren't many days sweeter than this. It is a joy to look out on your smiling faces. You've made it. You're ready to go out into the world as graduates of this fine university's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Congratulations to you, and to your parents and other family members, who I know are proud and perhaps a bit relieved to see you reach this day.

If you're feeling anything like I did when I finished college, you might be wondering about – even worried about - what opportunities await in the professional world – whether in advertising or PR, print journalism, broadcast journalism, online journalism or as someone who studies media. Looking at the upheaval in today's media landscape, it would be only reasonable to feel some uncertainty. We're in the midst of a revolution in how we produce and distribute content – news, advertising, information. What the media world will look like in two years, let alone when you're in a position to look back on your own careers, is anybody's guess. But I feel confident sharing a few convictions I've developed in the course of my work at the Rocky Mountain News and on the Web.

When I graduated in the early 1980s, the dream of most was to join a major organization, to tie our future to their brand. Today the world has changed. Some of those brands are already extinct. If there was only one thing I could tell you today it would be that you yourself are the most important brand. We've moved from an era of great companies and corporations dominating the landscape to an era where power is shifting to the creative and talented individual, just as power is shifting to the individual consumer. Today's media companies need you more than you may need them.

But with this reality, comes a challenge. We've moved beyond the time when a journalist or an advertising agency staffer could be a cog in a wheel, a step along an assembly line – and yes, newsrooms in some senses were assembly lines, no matter what some may like to tell you about one golden age or another.

It's only natural that some of you worry about a steady pay check and a steady job, about the opportunity to advance within a good organization, about having a future within a good organization – all things we thought about in an earlier time. I sure did. But what I'd encourage you to focus on in the years to come is not what organization you will join but what you will do with yourself. Embrace opportunity. Be unafraid to try things. Push yourself to do what you didn't think was possible. Not taking your best shot, not trying, that's the worst thing. Remember, you are your most important product. But you can only become the person you want to be by pushing yourself to reach your dreams. I hope that will be a person who cares about others, who cares about the stories of others.

Today the most important thing you can carry forth from this place is not mastery of a current computer program or a stylebook. It's curiosity, the willingness to learn, the desire for knowledge. Of one thing you can be sure: Whatever you'll be doing when you leave here will change over the course of your working life. As will the tools you use. But if you take the values you've learned here and if you build on them with your hunger to make a mark, to make a difference, I truly believe your future will be bright.

A mistake I've seen many make is that they always worry about the next job. They do their current job with one eye fixed on the next. That's not a way to live life – or to get ahead. The way to advance and to enjoy your work is to fully immerse yourself wherever you are, to commit to make something of what's in front of you. To those who do comes opportunity. To those who don't comes disappointment.

In the days when a single video camera cost more than $100,000, graduates didn't have many choices. They went to work for those who could buy the cameras. Today we live in a pro-sumer world. You can produce fantastic quality video with a camera that costs less than a 30th of what TV stations used to pay. What you have to offer is not just the ability to operate the camera. Of course it's a given that we expect you to learn technical mastery of your tools. But what you have to offer is more than that. It's your mind, your imagination, your spirit, your integrity.

Picasso is famously said to have said of computers that they are useless. Why? Because they can only give you answers. Whether he said that or not, there's an important truth in those words for you today. The ability you carry forth as graduates is the ability to ask questions, the desire to ask questions. Without those questions, the marvelous tools at your disposal today will produce nothing of value. With them, the sky is the limit.

That is your future. Frankly, I'm envious. Does that mean it's going to be easy? Definitely not. It may be more difficult than it was for those of us who worked in the era of dominant large media. But it definitely will be more exciting. You'll be able to do work your predecessors only dreamed of.

So do me one favor. Enjoy it. Don't get mired in worries about the future. You're the ones who are going to create it. And I need you to succeed. Our society needs you to succeed. Nothing is more important to our democracy than a free flow of information. That's your job. And you have the best tools the world has ever known to make it happen. The question is whether you have the will. I believe I see the answer before me, in the looks on your faces.

I can't wait to see what you do.

Thank you.