Can nylon even turn into mush?

Jashin Lin

So Article #1 is exceedingly optimistic and supportive of backpack/multimedia/convergence journalism and claims that the future of news media will be all but owned by the multimedia journalist, even sniping back at the Martha Stewart quip present in Article #2.

Well...Jane Stevens is a backpack journalist and she's not exactly going to declare herself defunct or misguided.

Article #2 has kind of a misleading headline. "Mush of mediocrity" made a snappy quote (alliteration!) but Martha Stone didn't really argue firmly from that position - at least, she didn't dismiss multimedia journalism outright. Less "backpack journalism will be mediocre" and more "backpack journalism is probably going to produce mediocre content, the way it's going now." She focused on its disadvantages and the difficulties, circa 2002, in implementing the new breed of journalist without sacrificing production quality.

A stray humorous remark in Article #1 - Pendenhall failing to notice a smudge in his camera lens during his coverage of Afghanistan - acknowledged some of these inherent concerns, but implied that journalists with more training and a few more years' experience would be able to avoid these problem easily. Article #2 took the same example and used it as a base for arguing that very few backpack journalists would truly be able to handle juggling and delivering high-quality content in several different mediums all at once, by themselves. It may be more expensive to send in a four-man team of specialists, but there won't be dirty lenses or dropped audio, not to mention all four would be able to look for ideal situations and moments for their individual mediums without having to worry about taking in content in all four of them.

Article #1 counters this with several points:
1. Backpack journalists tend to travel light & portable - a side effect is that the equipment they carry is smaller and more unobtrusive. Instead of huge, over-the-shoulder cameras, the backpack journalist can be less obvious with a handheld.
2. Not all endeavors will be a single journalist. The newsroom can have a producer putting together content filed by different journalists in different mediums into a single package. Other projects will have one or two reporters working on it long time.

On an instinctual level, I understand Stone's position. It should be difficult for one person to film, interview, record and take pictures at the same time.

On the hand, both articles cite statistics that people are increasingly accessing their news via the Internet, where they expect multimedia coverage to be the norm. And it would indeed be less expensive to send one journalist trained to think in multimedia terms and use multimedia tools.

After all, I am studying to be a backpack journalist - I can't exactly declare myself defunct or misguided.