Last week, 10,000 Words creator Mark S. Luckie wrote a blog post on five myths about digital journalism. I recommend you read the post, but just to provide a roundup, here are the five myths:
- Journalists must know everything.
- Social media is the answer (to saving journalism).
- Journalists must have database development skills.
- Comments suck/comments are essential for democracy.
- There are no journalism jobs.
This led to a rebuttal one day later from Andy Boyle, a digital developer with The New York Times Media Group in Tampa, Fla., on all but one of those points. In a nutshell: You do need to “do it all” with some form of success, there is no one answer to saving journalism and you do need basic database skills.
Combined, the two sides make for an interesting debate on what today’s journalists really need (the subject of this blog post in particular) and what is essential for the industry to move forward. Mindy McAdams, a journalism professor at the University of Florida, rounded up the two sides with her thoughts in a well-written post.
I’m not going to go from point to point on this. I think McAdams did a nice job of it and I generally agree with her arguments (in that both sides are right, to an extent). But I think when it comes to defining what journalists really need, we need to go broader than just what skills are essential, what programs you need to know and what devices you need to be familiar with. Why? Because these skills, programs and devices are changing all the time. One day, we needed to know how to use a voice recorder, then a standard video camera, then a flip cam, then a smartphone. Even different versions of the same program (for example, Photoshop CS2 and CS5) have different learning curves — and I had to work with all four in between during my five years in college!
The real key for journalists in moving ahead is adaptability. And not just being able to adapt, but being willing, too. Andy Boyle touched up on this: ” … you DO need to be able to do it all with some semblance of not-suckitude.” What I mean by adaptability is being willing and able to try new things to enhance the quality of your journalistic work with some degree of success. This can be anything from using your smartphone to shoot photos or video on the job to using a public records database for a follow-up story.
From working at Central Michigan Life for five years, I have come to know dozens of student journalists, possibly hundreds. I know plenty that graduated and moved on to good jobs with good newspapers. But I know others that didn’t. They either couldn’t find a decent, well-paying job, majored outside of journalism, went back to graduate school or dropped out of college altogether.
Not that any of those things are bad! But this is the nature of the beast of journalism: You have to put in a little extra, think outside the box and try new things as they come along for a good journalism job these days, and some people just aren’t willing to do that. It comes down to passion. Do you have to be a master at multiple trades? No. Just be aware of what’s at your disposal and try to maximize your effort in telling the best possible story.
Let’s get even broader with this. A former colleague of mine, Mark W. Smith, was honored as Central Michigan University’s Young Journalist of the Year by the journalism department at the annual Hall of Fame banquet in November. He graduated in 2007 and currently serves as Web Editor at the Detroit Free Press. How’d he get into such a prestigious job so fast?
His motto: “Work harder than the person next to you.”
That, really, is all it comes down to.
Posted by Brian Manzullo at December 1, 2010
Journalism