Las Vegas Sun new media editor Rob Curley said the above quote at a recent college media convention (I’m picking it up from Northern Illinois Newspaper Association’s blog). Apparently he shared the same observations — a bit more fleshed out — a few years ago here.
As a youngish person working at a newspaper group myself, I have had these wise words running through my head the past few days so I thought I’d write a reaction:
I graduated from college five years ago completely unprepared to work on anything that wasn’t going to be produced on dead trees. Even though I had only worked on newspapers, I still got the feeling that I was well-rounded because I had reported, edited and worked with graphics and layout. Those have definitely been skills I have needed to use on a daily basis, but it was quite naive of me to think it was close to all I needed.
We were enthusiastic about publishing our work online when I was in college, but that was the only thing we were thinking about doing online. I did not hear about the importance of photo galleries, reader comments, videos, slide shows, social media, text and e-mail alerts or any number of other new media tools until a couple of years after I graduated.
But when they did begin introducing these things at work, boy did my little communications-degreed conscience start in on the obstinacy. I initially resisted for 2 reasons:
- With all of the reader submissions, press release rewrites and calendar listings we had to focus on, I felt like we just weren’t taking ourselves seriously.
- I was not taught how to do this in J-School!
Number one is easy. Many journalists are constantly battling this catch-22. You want to be engaging. You want to deal with hard topics. Then your everyday reader shows some appreciation and loyalty for the little stuff and you write it off.
It was the first thing they applauded us for in print and it continues to be the first thing they appreciate online. You have to console yourself with the idea that they’ll continue to rely on you for spreading this information and then also be there when you’re reporting something more serious. That, and get over yourself and the idea that anything people enjoy reading leisurely can’t be taken seriously.
Number two is a much higher mountain to climb. When you’re fresh out of school, you’re setting out on a long road to unlearn the textbook examples you’ve been seeing for the past few years. There’s a disconnect between your sense of enjoyment as a content consumer and your sense of knowing what you’re doing as a content producer. The producer and consumer inside you — especially if you’ve been a good student — have to relearn how to communicate.
The producer takes a while to learn that it’s never going to be about repeating the same physical process as much as it is about keeping the same journalistic drive and mindset. Then the consumer needs to play focus group for the producer and tell him what he actually likes. And the producer has to take that seriously.
When you’ve been indoctrinated with the methods that seem to have been working, you need to be careful not to ensnare yourself. You need to integrate what you like and what’s engaged you.
We had some inspiring words on the wall in our news editing classroom about newspapers writing the first draft of history. It is so ironic that as young journalists we knowingly took that role and are sheepish about modifying the methodology ourselves along the way! We tweet, we status update, we blog, we upload photos and we comment all the time. We’ll race to communicate in whatever other forms we can develop, so there’s no need to be shy about doing it for our professional purposes as well as our personal ones.
If you wait until someone writes a book telling you to do it, that just means you’re always going to get scooped.
