12.31
While I think that Howard Owens’ heart is in the right place with his idea that Journalists should become wired, we have to realize that this is no replacement for staffers with real web experience.
Its great that you want to pick up a digital camera to “play” and learn. It’s great that you want to glean some understanding of the other “silos” in your newsroom. This is important and necessary to stay (or, more accurately, become) competitive, but to do so without the guidance of a cadre of experienced web staffers — those with at least a decade of web content creation, design or development — is not going to do you any good.
In fact it will probably hurt you.
All this “…buy a small digital camera and…” stuff seems to me to dismiss “web journalism” as trivial (“something you can just pick up”) and technically, I suppose, it is. Of course, so is writing, right? After all we all learned how to write in elementary school, didn’t we? My 3rd grader writes pretty well, so should your newspaper start hiring 3rd graders? (think of the expense savings!)
Well, if all your newspaper is doing is hoping that their existing staffers pick up this “web stuff” by some kind of osmosis without any real experience on staff, then they may as well start hiring 3rd graders, because that’s all they’ll be getting. And it’ll show.
I recently argued on my blog that newspapers need to take the same approach as other online businesses and make serious hires if they really want to compete in this arena. Relying on “volunteers” or quick-learners will get, as you stated, a paper produced by 3rd graders.
We should have strong Web teams (when possible, we can’t forget all the super small papers out there), but reporters need to get out the the text and print funk. When they work, they’re not just working for the paper anymore.
Learning all this Internet stuff should come in handy to reporters looking to truly utilize the Web as a reporting mechanism. To understand that their work serves many purposes beyond the print product. To know that the Web is more useful than a clearinghouse for online quizzes and PDFs.
Here’s my point of view, from someone who has worked online for more than a decade. I’m really annoyed when everyone’s talking about how easy my job is to learn (go pick up Dreamweaver and you can be the Web designer!) but when I try to take part in print projects I’m treated like I have no idea which way is up. Which is ironic since I’ve been trained in and actually worked on the print side. And you know most of the print people have never worked online.