The whole "backpack journalist" thing seems to be a pretty clear-cut issue to me at this point, much more so than either of these articles would have you believe. That might have to do with the fact that they were both written more than half a decade ago, and in the time since a lot has happened to help push the newsroom in the direction of convergence. I feel like some of what was said at the beginning of the "Mush of Mediocrity" article was laughable in its skepticism of journalists' ability to perform, essentially, multiple jobs within the field.
The article made it seem so difficult to learn to shoot video or take pictures, but I think this is an interpretation of the current paradigm through the eyes of people who grew up in the previous paradigm. Our generation has grown up with digital cameras, with PhotoShop and with fairly inexpensive video cameras. These things are far less foreign to us than to previous generations who didn't necessarily have as much access to them at a young age. Because of this, we are a lot quicker to pick up on how to utilize technology than the people quoted in these articles, for example. I liked the ridiculous quote about how "the specialist journalist isn't going away when the cameras have more knobs than the dashboard of my car." Obviously the specialist journalist isn't going away, merely because people will naturally enjoy and excel in certain fields more than they do in others. But that's no reason to neglect learning many other aspects of telling a story. Even a specialist photographer should know how to write a decent story or shoot video footage.
That all seems pretty obvious to me, but hopefully I am wrong on every count and the journalism of the future consists entirely of scribbling on walls inside of caves, the way God intended.
No comments:
Post a Comment