By Mark Briggs
A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor
This is a book about people, not technology. Sure, there’s a lot of technology in the pages to follow, but if you boil it all down to its core, its essence, you’ll find people trying to extend a noble and grounded craft into a new and unpredictable landscape. And it’s the people who matter, not the latest software or Web site.
If the people in this equation learn how make technology work for them, the rest is just details.
As journalists, we need to change our practices to adapt, but not our values. We’re like sailors in the English proverb I chose for the title to this introduction: No amount of wishing for a return to smooth seas will calm the water around us.
To carry the sailing metaphor even further: It’s time to tack. It’s time to turn the bow of our ship and make the wind in this new sea work for us, not against us.
We’ll use the best practices of other working journalists to point the way. We’ll draw from the groundbreaking and innovative work being done at newspapers, radio and television stations and Web sites around the U.S. We can learn from their experiences.
As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
The future is now
There’s never been a better time to be a journalist. That might sound odd considering how many newspaper journalists lost their jobs in 2006 (2,500),1 but there has never been a time that offered so many powerful ways to tell stories and serve readers with information. If you love journalism, you have to love having more tools at your disposal, more interaction with your audience and the near disappearance of traditional constraints of time and space.
Sure, times are tough on the business side. If you think about print news products – daily and weekly newspapers and magazines – in marketing terms, everyone knows about these products and knows how to use them. As a marketer, that’s an enviable position to be in when trying to sell something. Yet sales are declining every year (or every month at some publications). Why? One reason is that the digital economy has transformed that marketplace for news and information from one of scarcity to one of abundance (see Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail.”2) In today’s landscape many people don’t want to pay a few pennies every day for a product they may not use every day and they have to dispose of every day.
But this product in all its forms – journalism – is worth saving. It creates community on so many levels. And it creates marketplaces that are essential to the continuing viability of entire companies. Newspapers had a virtual monopoly on their marketplaces for decades. That’s ending now so the trick is to create new marketplaces before old ones completely disappear. Not necessarily to replace them right away, but to complement and support them.
“No longer are we purely media companies; we must become technology companies, too, and that means we must raise our technology IQ to compete in a digitally transformed world,” Michael Riley, editor of The Roanoke (Va.) Times, wrote in the December 2006 issue of Nieman Reports. “A big part of our success will be tied into rethinking what type of people we hire. The premium, moving forward, will rest on attracting more innovators into our midst and finding ways to give them the freedom and the backing they need to experiment and help move us into a new realm in which we can preserve the journalism and make a robust business model work.”
He’s right. We need new and different thinking in news organizations to survive and thrive in this new media landscape. But that doesn’t have to mean new and different people. This innovative thinking could come from the same smart and dedicated people who have thrived practicing journalism since before the Internet changed the game.
You just need to know the rules, the terms and the motivation.
You can do this
Can you cut a word in your copy and paste it into a different location to help the sentence flow? Then you have what it takes to edit audio and video.
Can you send an attachment with an e-mail? Then you have what it takes to publish a blog with pictures.
Change is inevitable. Progress is optional. The future is now.
With a little practice and experience, digital journalism will actually save you time. Talk to any newspaper reporters who have successful blogs and ask them if it takes more time out of their week because they’re doing “extra” work. The answer likely will be “no.” How can that be? The blog turns out to be a great organizational tool for beat reporters. It’s a notebook kept in the public sphere so reporters know which topics have “juice,” helping them prioritize the stories they should work on.
Go find someone who works on the Web site for a news company. Ask them how they learned to do what they do. In almost all cases I would wager that they are self-taught. It’s simply the result of wanting to learn something new.
That’s the secret: If you truly want to learn how to do digital journalism, you will. Remember, this is about people, not technology.
This handbook will guide you along the way, breaking down each skill and technology into digestible lessons that will be immediately usable for you in your work. It is organized so you can focus on one discipline at a time. It is practical, not conceptual. You will be able to perform the skill the same day you read about it.
It has to be that fast – there is no time to waste.
The fact is, if you work in journalism, you work for an online news organization – whether you want to or not.
Change is inevitable. Progress is optional. The future is now.
1. American Society of Newspaper Editors, Newsroom Employment Census, 2006. Numbers are for paid-circulation newspapers.
2. The Long Tail, Hyperion, July 2005. Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine.