Where the talent comes from (update)

There’s an interesting discussion going on at Wired Journalists touched off by a job pitch posted mid-morning by Howard Owens. In it, Howard identified the ideal candidates for “two ambitious, entrepreneurial individuals to help us reinvent local journalism” as “…recent college graduate[s] (or graduating this spring).”

What flowed from that, and more explicitly from some other descriptions of the ideal candidates, was a rather heated debate which led to a further post from Howard earlier this evening in which he wrote:

One reason I’m looking or recent grads is I want to avoid people who have had to sit in a cube … and start buying into all the bellyaching and negativity that goes on in a newsroom. It has nothing to do with money [raised as a possibility by one of the participants]. Money isn’t the issue at all. Far from it. It has to do with not being corrupted by the newsroom attitudes at most daily newspapers.

I find that a bit of stunning overstatement, but I can understand where Howard is coming from.

That’s not the point that I found interesting, though. It was a comment, which has gone largely unaddressed in the kerfuffle over newsroom culture, from Meghan Murphy, (midway down the reactions to the original post) which includes this:

Is there anyone out there posting this job description for experienced journalists? I’ve done newspaper reporting for four years – including narrative feature writing, blogging, podcasting – plus I spent two years as an editor at dot coms (so I know about web presentation and circulation). I also can wield an SLR digital camera. I’d love to be a MoJo, but the opportunities all seem to be for those straight out of college… Is it a budget thing? Or do editors think my generation (30 yo) isn’t as multimedia savvy?

I have no idea if the impression that the new mojo opportunities are primarily for the Bright Young Things straight out of college is correct. (It makes a certain economic sense: hire the trained, instead of training the hired.) But it would be interesting to know how many newspaper editors are ignoring potential in the newsrooms of the nations — as crabby as they may be — in favour of college-trained digital agers.

Update: Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that Howard is one of those in a position of editorial power who is ignoring newsroom potential. My interest is of a general sort, for particular and not personal.

Tags: hiring, journalism, Multimedia