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I was reminded of just how much the job of a journalist is changing after a weekly meeting with my colleague Michael Willoughby this morning. He's off to a press event this afternoon and the discussion inevitably led to how he was going to cover it. In the past that conversation would be the approach or the angle of the piece - whether it was news, a feature, part of an investigation etc. Instead it was a technical conversation - will he take a digital/video camera, an audio recorder, a laptop etc?
We ended up joking about him becoming a rather ridiculous multi-tasker - at events he ends up looking like one of those rather pathetic one man-musicians/buskers, with one hand shoving a microphone under an interviewee's mouth, the other snapping a quick shot of the event or building, while presumably he can write up some written notes on a pad on the ground with his toes.
Such multi-skilling a pretty universal trend now for a majority of journalists out there - I've heard that Guardian journalists are now armed with a small video camera and a laptop whenever they are sent out to chase stories. The ability to communicate and create content in multi-medias is now the demand from publishers. And to a degree it's tremendously exciting - like much to do with the web there's a buzz about breaking new ground and experimenting in new and different technologies. The risks though are pretty clear:
- Skills dilution: Here's the bit where I hark on about my tough at the coal face training as a hack. I started life on a local weekly paper in Yeovil called the Western Gazette. The conditions were tough (peanuts for pay, working weekends, covering parish council meetings/country fairs/ petty and minor crime) but you had to get to grips with the disciplines of journalism almost immediately. I had pages to fill every week on my own and relied very little on being spoon fed press releases - funnily enough there was not a mature PR market pushing out news on the latest breed of cow or the launch of a new historical society in rural Somerset. Getting those basics in finding news and then creating tight, accurate and balanced reporting for one medium is tough enough. Trying to replicate that across different media is asking too much of budding young hacks.
- Changing journalism - You only have to look at what's happening int he national newspapers to see how radically journalism is changing - a piece in today's Media Guardian on the revolution going on at the Telegraph illustrates this perfectly. The wholesale shift from print to online risks the shift downmarket in terms of quality, some in the piece warn. Journalism becomes more about quantity rather than quality as well as being technology-obsessed rather than content-focused - interviewing, research, a hunch, writing style etc.
- Immediacy Vs value - Linked to the second point. The pressure on journalists is to get as much news out as quickly as possible. In this headlong and rather frenetic rush the value of what journalists thrive on - the genuine scoop - lessens. Given how closely competing sites and news outlets keep tabs on their rivals one minute's scoop is the next minute's free-for-all bit of content.
These are concerns about the direction the web can take you. There are clear benefits to online, not least in the closeness one can get to an audience, the ability to track what content works and what doesn't and the ability to evolve and share content via the medium. The risk is that just as technology can undermine basic skills in other fields (such as in construction of course) it can undermine the basics of journalism.
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