Looking back to look foward
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
by Peter Merchlewitz
As many of you know, the media world is in a transition age, changing from newspapers and newscasts, to the Internet and streaming video to get our news nowadays. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we should forget all that we learn as news reporters from using an older medium.
In John McIntyre's You Don't Say, McIntyre interviews 2 of his colleagues from the American Copy Editors Society, Doug Fisher and David Sullivan, and their thoughts about mixing old and new reporting to get a desired outcome.
"Professor Fisher’s frustration:
[A]s I have gone around making a presentation on how to use new digital tools to stay connected, the response in some newsrooms and at conferences has been tepid at best in many cases and downright hostile in others (along the lines of how am I supposed to do my job with all this, to which I often have wanted to respond, this is going to be your job, dammit)."
"Mr. Sullivan’s frustration:
Too many journalists think the reader's pleasure is irrelevant, that the reader picks up the newspaper either to be instructed or to sit in awe of the literary talent being presented in it. In short, too many journalists are too full of themselves to succeed in the 21st century, when a newspaper needs to focus on what its readers want, since the readers' choices of what to do with their time seem limitless. That is the challenge for young journalists of the 21st century, who I hope will save us all."
So the challenge is twofold. We have to master the new technologies, both to acquire useful information and to convey it in the form in which readers prefer to receive it, and we have to do some hard thinking about who those readers are and what they are interested in reading.
