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However …
I don’t exactly get how this new offensive for journalistic multitasking is going to be an unalloyed blessing for news organizations, practically speaking – IF everything else stays the same. It seems as if the multitasking requirement is going to stress already stressed reporters, and depending on how workloads are organized, it could mean less time spent on responsible daily journalism.
It would take a new and probably radical paradigm to accommodate the new approach properly. I don’t see a clear discussion of a new paradigm yet. I see a modest retrofit under way, in which the current paradigm remains basically intact, and social and multimedia are simply added on. That looks to me like a problem.
It takes longer to produce a multimedia package and deal with social media than it does simply to write a story. Instead of just reporting and writing, a reporter now must do, let’s say, six times as many things: 1) tend to Twitter and Facebook, 2) deal with audio files; 3) shoot and edit video; 4) maybe even shoot still photos and make slide shows with sound tracks out of them; 5) put together Web packages; and 6) in doing so, be fluent in and use Adobe InDesign and Photoshop and other software and possibly HTML.
I’m not sure how many people have the left and right brains working at a high enough level to pull multimedia off.
In any case, newsroom staffs have been shrinking – not growing. So: Less staff, more work – and no indication that I can see that pay is doing much else than stagnating or falling in the depressed journalism market. Doing the math, it looks as if reporters who do what the generals want will be working more, for less pay, or doing less journalism, or both. If design desks – staffed by people who don’t write – end up taking over most of this digital multitasking, we’ll have to hire more design folks to take up that slack, at the expense of reporters, who have taken the time and expense to learn multimedia. Somewhere, in this economy, somebody has got to lose.
I’m not just sitting in a Barcalounger speculating about this. In my own journalism career, I adapted repeatedly to advances in technology that were touted to make things better. Pretty consistently, they ended up in some way making things worse. When I try to understand these new developments, I put them in the context of what I would have to do if I were still working at The Tribune.
For example, when The Tribune long ago introduced PC networks into the newsroom, one of the selling points was that they would streamline the news process, make everything run more smoothly and give us more time to do good work. What happened gradually, somehow, was that our all-editions deadline of 9 a.m. or so was pushed up by a couple of hours, because otherwise we couldn’t get everything done. This meant staff had to come in that much earlier in the cold, dark morning, and there was less of a window to capture that day’s breaking news. On top of that, we were constantly dealing with glitches and system crashes. But OK.
For another example, the arrival of QuarkXpress, which launched in 1987, and electronic pagination were greeted with assurances that this would give the newsroom more control over the production of the paper and streamline the process. It did allow the publishing company to fire huge swaths of now-obsolescent back-shop employees – who happened to be our longtime friends. But, of course, we in the newsroom ended up doing their work. Deadlines did not change for the better. But OK. We absorbed these things.
Understand that for years I put out The Trib’s opinion pages by myself, in a prodigious display of ferocious work ethics. This included everything – a list too long to include here – from writing to selecting and editing columns to hiring and editing local freelance columnists and cartoonists to designing and paginating the section every day using Photoshop and QuarkXpress, to attending meetings to dealing with the public to running the political endorsement process and on and on. The Trib was blazingly innovative, and I embraced efforts to upgrade our opinion pages constantly to the point at which, along with everything else, we were running four opinion-page sections a week with artistically designed and illustrated cover pages featuring cover pieces I solicited from people in the community. It got to the point where the work was too much even for me to handle, and we hired a deputy editor to help me.
Of course, we kept doing more and more. We were trying to boost readership. One doesn’t expect more readers by offering less.
When The Trib added a Web page, and grew increasingly committed to it, there was no more pretense that this would be a streamlining or time-saving device. It was obviously extra work. Not too onerous, since we were just basically posting newspaper copy to the Web, but it was openly on top of everything else. We kept after it. But it was not hard to see what was coming.
It’s in this context that I look at the social-multimedia prescription. As The Trib’s Web site improved, we would have been able to do more and more – and would have been expected to do so – but with no more help or income. Maybe less. Animated cartoons, editorial packages, increasingly interactive cover pages and columns, video and audio files. These things and more all are cool. I despair at the thought of getting them done consistently and at a high level of quality – in addition to everything else. Something would have to give. I imagine it would be content. There would be less of it, or less time spent on it.
For a golden time during the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, even while loading up with technologically driven work, we were winning all sorts of national awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. All the work seemed worth it at the time. It was OK. At the end, however, we seemed to be on a treadmill that just ran faster and faster, without nearly as much to show for it. And that was without adding the generals’ prescriptions to the equation.
Who’s on Twitter?
Captains of industry can push from the top down to restructure the economy so that more and more people just can’t live without Twitter & Co. – can’t shop for bargains, buy things, make reservations and so on. But I’m not so sure that everyone will follow – or that the move won’t create another digital divide, in which my students, who are not wealthy, will be on the losing side.
I will leave it up to other researchers whether Twitter and other social media are becoming increasingly popular and whether more and more people are using them for news, and whether shiny multimedia packages are enticing more readers and doing the job of communicating important information, rather than losing readers and the intended messages to ADHD.
Here is what I see on the ground, however.
I check with the 110 students in the English and journalism classes I teach every semester and ask how many folks have Twitter accounts. Maybe two or three hands go up per class. My students here at CNM, in any case, are not tapped into Twitter. Is it just Albuquerque? Just community college? Maybe this will change. There doesn’t seem to be much momentum from the ground up for this, however. If we keep hammering into them that they MUST have Twitter accounts, they’ll set them up. But not because they think they need them.
My wonderful Chronicle students love their paper newspaper and are happy putting it out. They recognize that ACP contests make a big deal about Web pages and hand out awards for them. The staff is willing to dive deeper into its Web page – we do have one at thecnmchronicle.wordpress.com that is increasingly popular – and the students are tech savvy and think the generals’ prescriptions are cool. But they know that, given the staff at hand, this would be extra work that they don’t have time to do. Maybe, they think, they could hire another employee or two to work on this. But revenues for more employees are contracting at CNM, and federal sequestration could make the situation worse.
The night of the prescient
One evening some 20 years ago I was attending an editorial page editor’s conference at the American Press Institute in Reston, Va. The day’s sessions had ended, and I was talking in a leisurely and semi-exhausted way with an API official indoors as darkness fell outside. I’m not sure of this, but I believe it was W. Lawrence Winter, who was API’s executive director from 1987-2003. The dates match with the story the official told me, in any case.
The official said he had worked for a long time for newspapers, until the owners introduced QuarkXpress and pagination to his publication, saying these were great new inventions that would give the newsroom more control over the paper and make things run much more smoothly. He said he could see the handwriting on the wall – more work for everybody without much improvement in content. So he left newspapering forever to work for API.
He was prescient.
I don’t hate the new social-multimedia. I’m looking forward to experimenting with it. But unless we can come up with a humane and thoughtful way to make it work, I can see the handwriting on the wall. The traditional media are struggling with decline. The new media are struggling with how to make enough money to support working journalists. Coming into circumstances like these and simply increasing workloads, demands for expensive equipment and so on, doesn’t compute.
Maybe I am prescient, too.
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