Masters of none
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.