The Modern Journalist

Don’t Feel Bad, Online News Managers Don’t Get the Web Either

It’s 8:46 on a Thursday. My kids are currently working through their first interactive, fiction story programs. They are at various skill levels. Some of the kids can only build stories in 10-15 rooms. Much more than that gets unwieldy. Others have created complex, 40-room stories.

None of them are programming. We are using created tools — Informs for the advanced kids, Adrift for the introductory kids — instead focusing our time on learning the interface for the stories and tackling the story elements that go into good interactive narratives.

I should be happy. This is my favorite class. Instead, I’m trying not to have a heart attack while I read this Poyner piece about the skills that journalists should learn to work in an online environment. If these folks are really being honest — and if they are running the news rooms of major metropolitan papers — then as my friend Chris says, it’s time to lock the doors because the future of online journalism is bleak at its best.

The top three tools:

1. collect and edit audio (which later comes with a caveat of writing good audio stories and advanced editing skills)
2. work with databases (which makes no sense unless they mean build databases; and by build I mean build databases for readers, not for reporters)
3. develop interface design skills (which they describe as Flash skills, the most ridiculous use of the term “interface design” in the history of, well, interface design.)

The skills that these people are describing are, at best, rudimentary one-to-many skills: recording and editing audio (that takes 30 minutes to learn how to do), Flash (one of the worst ways to present “interactive stories”), basic HTML.

The piece goes on say that it’s important for journalists to understand how people access information online — even though the entire piece is about exactly the opposite.

If this is really the thinking happening at the New York Times, The Star Tribune, The Washington Post — supposedly the bleeding edge of traditional media — then it feels completely correct for me to steer my kids away from this type of career. The skills they are looking for are basic high school courses which have very little relevance in an interactive, keyword search, RSS world.

If journalists were smart, they’d hired really good journalists and the editors and managers in charge of the newsrooms would sit down with technologists and figure out how to best serve readers with technology — not how to best train journalists to create multimedia packages that were cool ten years ago (remember the multimedia CD?).

One of my favorite lines in the piece is that the skilled journalist should know how to post video as well. Post video? Like on Google Video? or by FTP’ing? Or by compressing video?

It’s stunning to me that one of the leading outlets for journalism — Poynter — would publish this as helpful information. And if this is really the thinking in news rooms, as I’ve been told by several friends in the industry, then I for one welcome our new Google and new media overlords. Otherwise, we’ll be clicking on Flash files for the next 20 years.