Will We Turn Great Writers and Broadcasts into Bums?
Can individual journalists be all things: writers, videographers, photographers, and audio broadcasters? They can, but they will not be able to do them all well, according to Richard Addis, former editor of the British Daily Express. He now runs Shakeup Media, an editing and design service. He writes in part:
The most important point is that all types of journalism are a deep craft. Journalists know this. Management consultants tend not to. The problem is that in a business crisis like the one we’re having now, the consultants get powerful. There are myriads of small skills involved in writing a good headline or producing a decent story that are individually not especially complex but collectively make all the difference. These skills do not transfer well from print to radio or from video to column writing.
The second point is that convergence encourages the wrong kind of journalism. The stuff that does translate well is precisely the stuff that we want less of, the journalism of very little value. We’re all sick of commoditised news. What we’re hungry for is insight, wit, personality, attitude. That is precisely what dies first on the multimedia spokes. And then to cap it all, the fabled efficiencies are vastly over-rated. Fewer Jacks of all Trades are very seldom more efficient than a greater number of Masters of Some. Particularly now when part-time and freelance and home working is so much easier and more prevalent and there are Masters for hire all over the place.
I tend to agree with Addis. I tell my students when it comes to just writing straight newspaper reporters are often not great feature writers, and feature writers are often terrible straight news reporters. Then I use baseball as an analogy. Would you ask the center fielder to be the pitcher? I even have a Kent Hrbek theory of writing, that says if you move a great first baseman over 30 feet and ask him to play second base you will make him a bum and have a very bad second baseman. Now imagine asking him to play football and basketball too. That’s what convergence does: write, shoot video, do audio. Yeah, it can be done, but not very well.
October 17th, 2006 at 11:17 am
Tell me about it. Ever seen a package I edited myself? Trust me, you don’t want to. Still, the more you practice, whether it’s pitching or shooting and editing video, once you can write a decent, lively sentence at least, the better we all can get at a variety of things — if our hands are held to the fire.
I’d imagine that a lot of writers, the good ones especially, do NOT want their hands held to a video fire. They’d like to keep ‘em on the keys, thank you very much. So, I can feel their pain in the newsrooms, a place I’ve never even worked before. Just TV newsrooms/lunatic asylums.
And given even that long electronically-based history, you put me in front of Final Cut Pro and I break out in a cold sweat.
Now put me in front of George Clooney, and, well…
October 19th, 2006 at 4:41 am
I have to disagree. I was part of the team that worked on the Telegraph integration plan and there’s no threat to the craft of journalism or danger of people suddenly having to be experts in something that’s alien to them. I responded to the Addis article on my blog here: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/iandouglas/oct06/addis.htm