The Power of Us

Hey newsies, make way for the websies

Posted by on Feb 26, 2009 in Business, People, Skills, Social Media, We Media Miami 2009 | 2 comments

UPDATE: Clarifications have been made to this post in the comments section

Three recent J school grads bemoan that they work for newspaper web sites where most of what they do is click buttons to paste news stories and photos on the site. This is their first job in the “new” news media. As “web producers,” they are antsy to get on with what they were trained to do at good J schools – gather news and information and package that into multimedia stories.

Where’s the “journalism” in what they do, they wonder? They look around the newsroom and it is top heavy with aging boomer reporters, many of whom are about to riffed or fired. Traditional photojournalists get the plum assignments for the web. And video is not that hot a priority for the newspaper companies they work for. On the off chance there is an opening for a newsroom reporter, chances are the opportunity will go to a seasoned “old style” journalist with lots of years of experience under his or her belt.

The slow pace of change in their newsrooms is exasperating even though they work for a daily “newspaper” they go to Twitter and Google for breaking news. They wonder what the newspaper of the future will look like. Definitely not a broadsheet. Maybe a magazine format with opinion and interpretative stories.

“I’ve been taught to multitask and I know how to do it all in a highly specialized format,” says Mathilde Piard, a recent grad of Columbia School for Journalism. She works as a “web producer” for the Palm Beach Post and spends most of her workday updating stories and making style changes to news stories for posting on the website.

“My true love is journalism,” says Piard. “I’m a little disappointed.”

Given the dire economy, though, Piard and University of Florida grads Mallory Colliflower and Bridget Carey, a web editor and tech reporter, respectively, for the Miami Herald web site, say they are happy to have jobs period. “I’m not complaining,” said Colliflower, who graduated in 2008.

Time is definitely on their side, as they wait for the newsies to make way for the websies.
In the meantime, patience is virtue.

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Zita Arocha

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  • http://www.mathildepiard.com/ Mathilde Piard

    Ok so I hate to be the person who turns around and says "I didn't say that" about a quote of mine in a story by a fellow journalist, but I feel that I have to correct some of the things that have been attributed to me in this blog post.

    “'I’ve been taught to multitask and I know how to do it all in a highly specialized format'” – As a journalism student at Columbia specializing in new media, I was taught how to do a little bit of everything (reporting & writing, shooting and editing video, building websites etc). Concerning the multimedia skills, we dabbled into many things, and essentially are not experts in any of the mediums. So yes, I am multiskilled, but no, I am not highly specialized, far from it. I probably did use the expression "highly specialized" in my chat with Zita – not to describe myself, but on the contrary to bemoan how roles in my newsroom are very narrow in focus: reporters solely report and write, photographers just take photos, videographers only shoot videos, and web producers, well, most of the time are just digital grunts. I don't think this is paving the way to a bright future for my paper, and I have made my views clear with my bosses and coworkers.

    "She works as a “web producer” for the Palm Beach Post and spends most of her workday updating stories and making style changes to news stories for posting on the website." No, I am not a copy editor and I made that very clear during our chat at WeMedia: I don't touch stories at all – we have another staff member who takes care of that. Up until January (when we hired someone new to take care of this), I did keep the homepage fresh by rotating stories, headlines, photos. In that sense, yes, all I did was "click buttons to paste news stories and photos on the site." Since then, I have had a lot more free time to work on more creative things. So I no longer spend as much of my workdays doing this type of work, which makes me very happy.

    "They are antsy to get on with what they were trained to do at good J schools – gather news and information and package that into multimedia stories" – Absolutely. Yes. I agree with everything in the first two graphs of this blog post.

  • Zita Arocha

    Thanks for the clarification Mathilde. What I meant by saying you "make style changes" to stories is that you make sure the stylistic elements of a story – font/layout, etc _ conform to the website format. Bingo on on my misstating that you called yourself "highly specialized" when you were in fact referring to the role of journalists in traditional newsrooms. I love the instant feedback loop writers get with new media. I am definitely a convert to web journalism, actually have long been a critic of the top-down journalism practiced by the old-style journalists. Keep on pushing your bosses to let you do more of what you learned in J school.