Today’s journalism motto: Faster, better, more

Photo by Daniel Sato/Voices

By Audrey Kuo
Voices

In the era of shrinking editorial staffs and a continuous news cycle, those remaining in the journalism industry are asked to do more — and then some.

At the Los Angeles Times, the entire metro desk posts continuous updates on L.A. Now, a blog that highlights local issues.

In Portland, photographers from The Oregonian shoot and edit video in addition to photos.

And at the Boston Globe, health reporters post stories that don’t make it into print on White Coat Notes, a blog on Boston.com.

“People are expected to blog, Twitter, edit audio, write captions, write a 300-word story, and then do it all again in the same day,” said Duy Linh Tu, coordinator of new media at the Columbia University’s School of Journalism in New York.

As a result, Tu has seen a marked increase in registration numbers for the Web design and Flash classes he teaches through mediabistro.com.

“All my classes are sold out, and it’s definitely not a function of how awesome I am,” he said. “Nine out of 10 times, someone is like, ‘I need to get my online portfolio,’ or ‘I need to develop my online skills,’ or ‘I just got laid off.’ ”

As layoffs and buyouts sweep the nation’s newsrooms, the message to journalism students and professionals alike is clear: Pick up new skills, or find a new job.

Meredith Melnick, who received her master’s degree from Columbia this year, said her new media skills were “really poor” before she started J-school.

“I never held a camera before. I didn’t know anything about Flash; I didn’t know Final Cut Pro,” she said. “It was all new to me.”

Now, Melnick said it’s “completely unrealistic to send people into the job market in journalism without those skills.”

Even those who have been in the industry for years are experiencing changes.

Larry Harnisch, a copy editor on the Los Angeles Times metro desk, now spends one day a week off the copy desk to work on The Daily Mirror, a Times blog about L.A. history.

He digs through archives and city records, scans and uploads old documents and photographs and works on the blog’s design, using the HTML skills he taught himself.

“It’s really like having two jobs,” he said.

Reporters are also scrambling to produce content under tighter deadlines to meet the pressures of an online cycle.

“The beautiful thing is, there’s nobody to tell you, ‘You buried the lead, you need a nut graf,’ ” Harnisch said about blogging. “But the terrible thing is, there’s nobody there to tell you, ‘You buried the lead.’ … If something isn’t working, boy, there really isn’t someone there to tell you.”

Joel Odom, online sports editor at The Oregonian in Portland, said reporters increasingly file stories directly to an online story template, which editors then read and publish immediately.

The staff is also pushing to increase its Web presence, so the breaking news team often file stories from the scene, shoot video and return to the newsroom to edit footage.

“We’ve had to pick and choose places to have less coverage or divert resources away from one thing and toward something else,” Odom said.

But Odom said the staff has accepted these inevitable tradeoffs.

“It just means we have to make better decisions with our resources and how people allocate their time,” he said.

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Core values

As journalists learn new skills and adapt to digital media, it is important that they maintain core values. Joe Grimm, who writes Poynter’s “Ask the Recruiter” column, offers a list of essential qualities for journalists in print, broadcast and anything in between.

• Be ethical — “That’s the big one.”

• Be adaptable and versatile — Journalists may report one day and edit the next, or do both in the same day.

• Be reliable — “You gotta be where you said you’re gonna be; you gotta do what you say you’re gonna do.”

• Be accurate — Especially as copy editors become scarce, Grimm said, it’s important to get facts straight and be accountable.

• Take initiative and stay involved — “I don’t know if editors are stressing this as much these days, but it’s important to be attuned to your audience.”

• Be collegial — Editors “don’t like people who are hard to edit.”

• Be lucky — “If you can do all those things, you can have 90 percent of your bases covered,” Grimm said. But being lucky helps.

This entry was posted on August 13, 2009 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Voices 2009. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.