Scott Karp asks How Many Journalists Would Go All Digital If They Could?
I know if I were still a working journalist, I’d do everything in my power to what Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal is doing. In her All Things Digital blog post, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love the Blog: Goodbye Dead Trees!, she explains:
Besides saving all those trees, of course–which, let me start off the new year by being completely honest, never occurred to me until just this very second–it’s simple and obvious: The future of all media is digital going forward.
Digging a little deeper (going beyond the trendline), she adds:
I think that ability to keep at it, doing original reporting, and then be quickly informed of more by other bloggers and, most importantly, readers, gives this media a kind of living nature that is almost impossible in print form.
The result is a form of journalism that becomes more powerful as it rolls along, like a very smart snowball, linking and cross-linking and acquiring a massive base of background information that makes a single story so much more.
In my case, what’s attractive about all-digital journalism is the ability to match story to form, extending the choice from between inverted pyramid and nut graf to between words, sounds and images or in all their potential combinations.
(The argument against that has been that the result is the master-of-none journalist, widely but not deeply skilled. The rejoinder is that there are, when it comes right down to it, few masters of any of the storytelling forms.)
I suspect that asking Scott’s question in a typical newsroom — how many journalists would go all digital if they could? — and factoring in the handful of “masters” that may be there, would go at least part of the way to identifying some of the newsroom cultural issues that need to be dealt with as the inexorable digitization of all media continues.
UPDATE: Talk about “the living nature” of the digital story. Kara has expanded on her original post with the very entertaining How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Learned To Love the Blog: Truthiness!
TAGS: JOURNALISM, MULTIMEDIA, ONLINE, STORYTELLING
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for print journalists who A) didn’t see this coming or B) are unwilling to learn new skills.
As a journalism teacher, I’m expected to be the master of photography, writing, editing, broadcasting, web design, yearbook, newspaper and more. I am supposed to stay current with all the software and trends in each of these fields. This is no mean task. But I do it. So can those lazy print journalists if they want to.
Maybe it is shock. But when that wears off, you must pick yourself up, dust yourself off and decide what it is you want to do with the rest of your career besides naval gaze. Multimedia and web is not that difficult. I learned most of it on my own – as a hobby. I’m not all that young – I’m 40. So get a grip.