04.12
I’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of so-called “integrated” Interactive Media departments in several newspaper newsrooms and a trend that worries me is the tendency to choose “seasoned” print journalists with little or no web experience over seasoned web journalists — some with a fair amount of print experience — when staffing these newly integrated online operations.
Not good.
I can understand the gut desire of a 60-year-old grizzled print editor to want to staff this new fangled intarweb thing with “his people”, I really can. People he can talk to, people he can understand, people who punctuate spoken sentences with “man” instead of “dude“.
Dude, its also insane.
The logic here, I’m sure, is a talented story teller is a talented story teller, no matter what the medium. The problem is that’s just not true. It didn’t work when they tried to read newspapers on the radio in 1930 and it didn’t work again when they tried to read radio scripts on TV in 1950.
Interactive Media (that’s “newspaper websites” to the buzzword deficient) is a medium unto itself. It has it’s own “culture” and it’s own direction. It’s OK that you don’t know what XMLHttpRequest() is or what the difference is between an XML DTD and an XML Schema, but you need to know about where online media is going because if you don’t, you’re just reading the newspaper on the radio.
Recently a former co-worker, with several years experience building and maintaining a large metro daily website, recounted to me a story about how her new inexperienced masters in the newsroom spent 20 minutes discussing whether an explanatory blurb was necessary on a story explaining what the blue underlined words were.
Dude, they’re hyperlinks!
1996 is on the phone, they want their reporters back.
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