The Public Life Choice of Being a Journalist

In the 2012 media world a person who makes the choice to be a journalist makes a choice to be a public figure.  If you're not ready for that, your not ready to be a journalist.

I suspect it's always been this way.  Part of wanting to write to be read (which is different from writing in a journal and putting it away at the back of a drawer in the basement) is wanting your name to appear on a page.  That is: when you choose to be a journalist you're choosing to ask for people's attention. You're choosing to be a public figure.

This may not have meant much in the past, when it took days to get a letter to the newspaper.  But the Internet and social media mean that the public figure a journalist presents is more accessible than it has ever been, and is expected to be more accessible every day.

Some journalists say they want to maintain their privacy.  That may not have been difficult in the past, but it's impossible today.  Journalists have to be visible to their readers if they want to maintain their credibility and they have to be accessible on social media sites.

To expect anything else would be like running for president without expecting to have to read the State of the Union Address.

If you want to remain private, becoming a journalist is not a good choice for you.

The Internet Changes Reporters' Work

The Internet has changed a reporter's life in so many ways that it's hard to know where to start. Older reporters often celebrate the changes, remembering how it used to take fifteen minutes to upload a single black and white picture to a single destination using a wire machine.

That's not including the time it took to develop the film, print picture, type up a caption and paste it, with glue, on the front of the picture and attach the still damp paper to the drum of the wire machine.

Decline and Fall

David Carr wrote an article in the New York Times today which read like a list of people lost at sea on a wrecked ship:

- The Christian Science Monitor abandons its daily paper.
- Time Inc. to lay off 600.
- Gannett to lay off up to 3,000.
- LA Times to reduce newsroom my 75.
- Newark Star Ledger to reduce staff by 40%.
- TV Guide (the institution) sold for $1.

Carr says the collapse is not from lack interest, but because "more than 90 percent of the newspaper industry's revenue still derives from the print product." He adds that advertising is in decline and he repeats the old observation that revenue online is pennies to dollars compared to old media products.

All of this is bad news. Carr ends the piece raising the issue that the blogosphere without newspaper reporters' stories to annotate will be a quiet place.

But the point about the blogosphere is that it is a place where new trusted brands can grow. Those brands are able to publish news at a fraction of the cost of newspapers or broadcasting systems. So the pennies that they earn don't need to be dissipated on costly legacy publishing systems. Those pennies can go into reporting.

The challenge is for online media organizations to show they can produce better reporting than we see today in our legacy newspapers, and to do it at a cost that online revenue can support. Is that such a tall order?

Job Blog Insurance

Amy Gahran has a great post on how every journalist should have a blog as, amongst other things, job insurance.

She adds to that some great hints on starting and running a blog. Most you've seen before, but to these she adds: Don't work for anyone who won't let you keep blogging.

Well said.

Journalists and Blogging

I've tried to convince a number of journalists that they don't exist if they don't have their own blog.

For the modern journalist it's a wonderful and free way to interact with your readers and find out more about the stories you're working on. I'm always surprised at the amount of resistance journalists and editors put up to the idea of starting their own blogs.

So it was very refreshing to read an article on Alfred Hermida's blog entitled How blogging creates new opportunities for journalists. It lays out a number of examples of how blogging has helped journalist and blogger Scott Elliott to do his job, and ends with an editor's reasons why he likes to hire journalists who are blogging.

Also: For beginning bloggers here are a few useful words from Jay Rosen about "mastering the hoziontal part of publishing."

Four Roles for the New Journalist

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, suggests four roles that journalists may find themselves playing in the world of Web journalism, in a post by Alfred Hermida (Reportr.net, Feb. 2008).

They include authenticator, sense-maker, navigator and forum-leader. Journalists have always been authenticators and sense makers. They were navigators and forum leaders too, except that readers were only able to observe where they navigated and have their forums around their dinner tables with their family and friends, and without the presence of the forum leading journalist.

What has changed is the journalist's presence in the lives of his/her audience, and the audience's ability to navigate a good deal of the information the journalists used to keep to themselves, and then talk about it with the journalist.

More:

Project for Excellence in Journalism

And David Pogue writes this about organizations taking advantage of Web 2.0 technologies.

Radio Reporters and VJs

Can reporters from one old medium be expected to succeed in many?

It's possible, but it takes time. As a radio reporter with a microphone, keen to get an extraordinary moment of sound for your radio story, you have to be watching your subject carefully, and putting your whole mind into the conversation, where it's going and what your subject is saying.

A photographer at the same scene, is listening to what the subject is saying and wondering how to best capture him or her in a picture that does more than show what's there. The picture has to tell the story. So the photographer is thinking about the story, and watching the subject and how the subject relates to his/her environment. That's a full time job.

So the only conclusion you can reach is that if the radio reporter is to get good pictures he's going to have to do it once for the audio, and once for the pictures.

So Why Not Be A VJ?

If the sound that a reporter could get from a video camera was good enough for radio, would all radio reporters become VJs?

I doubt it. Firstly getting good sound on a video camera takes some work. Secondly, most radio reporters would say the presence of a video would ruin the intimacy of the interview. That may explain why so few radio reporters have picked up video cameras.

Close Up Is Audio's Wide Angle.

To get an establishing shot, a radio reporter needs to go in close. A video reporter needs to stand back. The same task sends them running in opposite directions.

For example if the story is about a crowd of protesters, the radio reporter will want to run into the thick of it to get the best sound available to establish that there's a crowd there. The VJ, to create the same idea has to stand back. How can one person do the two jobs at the same time?

Resources:
1. Beginners: Here's a DJ with a great tip from YouTube on how to get audio out of a board at the level you want, with basic equipment.

About this blog

Robin Lubbock is the Director of New Media at WBUR in Boston. He started this blog as a presentation for a conference and has continued posting since then with thoughts and ideas about the future of news in the United States.

This blog is written in his own time and is in no way endorsed by the station or meant to reflect its opinion.

Growth in Visitors to Newspaper Blogs

According to a story in the New York Times in January 2007, Nielsen/Netratings estimated the number of visitors to newspaper blogs had "skyrocketed", and in December 2006 was:

USAToday.com blogs: 1,239,000
The New York Times' blogs: 1,173,000
SFGate blogs: 515,000
Washingtonpost.com blogs: 433,000
Boston.com blogs: 388,000

These were early days for newpaper blogs, and if this is skyrocketing, it's on a planet with a thin atmophere. Compared with the visitor numbers these papers overall are racking up, these totals are small, although not insignificant. To compare them to daily traffic, here are some numbers from Editor and Publisher for February 2007:

New York Times: 12,960,000 uniques - 455,527,000 page views
USAToday.com: 9,050,000 uniques - 169,517,000 page views
Washington Post: 8,030,000 uniques - 154,836,000 page views
SFGate.com: 3,236,000 uniques - 51,617,000 page views
Boston.com: 3,197,000 uniques - 57,154,000 page views

Alexa (for whatever it's worth) says that in May 2007 only 2% of the Times' traffic went to its blogs. (Nielsen along with the estimates above suggested that blogs accounted for 13% of parent sites' total traffic.)

(There's a huge amount of additional information in the Editor and Publisher story mentioned above - check it out.)