By: David Goldstein
“Backpack journalism” is a term that comes with many negative connotations. The very wording suggests an amateur journalist, producing amateur quality news stories. Critics see the backpack as a bag of mediocre tricks that a journalist may draw from, but can never really use to truly impress the audience. In my opinion, they are wrong.
I would like to think of it as more of a tool belt than a backpack. The multimedia journalist is a highly trained professional who has many tools at his or her disposal. Just like a handyman, able to fix any problem, a multimedia journalist is able to tell a story through any medium, each one building upon the other in order to give the audience the most complete and in depth story possible. With video, audio, text, and still photos at their disposal, multimedia journalists are not limited to one form of storytelling, just as people do not limit their news intake to just one medium.
A reporter who has been following a story from the beginning will have a more in depth knowledge of the subject than a team of reporters all from different mediums. Working with so many people, journalists are bound to uncover the same surface information over and over unless there is good communication between them. If one person is able to cover the same story using different mediums, he or she is likely to gather different information that provides a broader view of the issue. A journalist's skills must change and expand along with the way people's news intake is expanding, and multimedia journalists are ahead of the curve.
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