Help chart the future of local news and community. Apply for a Representative Journalism Fellowship. Leonard Witt, holder of the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University, is leading a one-year trial in the college town of Northfield, Minn., 35 miles south of Minneapolis.

The representative journalist will spend a year working with the LocallyGrownNorthfield.org citizen blogger site to report one in-depth story per week on a critical civic or social issue. The reporting will be an open, transparent process where citizens can offer facts, comments, and perspective as the story develops. The final form of the story will be published in digital and print formats. Often, citizens will convene to discuss the findings of the reporting and participate in public meet-ups to discuss the results and next actions. This is not an assignment for an order taker. You must be an enterprising, self starter. You must have a willingness to engage with citizens day in and day out. When needed, you will produce work in multiple formats, including print, web, radio, access-TV and other formats. This will increase civic dialog in a highly educated community of 17,000 people and inspire the community to support and sustain your work. Bringing to this job a magazine-writing sensibility with in-depth reporting experience would be helpful. In the end, we want to talk about Northfield’s strengths and weaknesses, its joys and tribulations, its people and its governmental, civic, educational and economic institutions. Part of our inspiration is the Public Journalism Network’s Charter Declaration, which says in part:

• We believe the diversity and fragmentation of society call for new techniques for storytelling and information-sharing to help individual communities define themselves singularly and as part of the whole set of communities;
• We believe in the value of studying the dynamics of communities and the complexity of public life;
• We believe the best journalism helps people see the world as a whole and helps them take responsibility for what they see.

http://pjnet.org/charter/

Your day-to-day guidance will come from the community and the principals of Locally Grown. As a journalist, however, you will report to one of the nation’s most respected daily newspaper editors. You will receive regular guidance from participants in the Journalism That Matters collaborative and when requested from our highly respected national advisory board. The goal will be to provide high quality, ethically sound news and information, which will enrich the daily and civic lives of the people of Northfield. Email a letter of interest, resume, clips and references to Leonard Witt, lwitt@kennesaw.edu. A personal interview will be required at a mutually convenient location. To start immediately.

Here is one opinion from  Prescott Shibles:

I would even venture to say that having even mediocre Web/multimedia skills makes you far more employable and valuable. Those skills will dramatically impact salary and the number of job offers…telling students to be a specialist in a world that values versatility is doing them a disservice.

  What are your thoughts? Join the discussion.

Here is another update, from Paul Conley, who works with folks who hire young graduates:

…what I hear every day from my clients and other professionals — a college kid with a resume that could have been written in the 1970s is not worth hiring. I don’t care how well he writes. Writing well is not enough.

Join the discussion.

First, we have to make a distinction between reporters and the writers who are writers and reporters too. I think in terms of a continuum from straight news reporting to feature writing to literary nonfiction.

The vast majority of people in the news business are reporters, they collect facts and write them in a coherent fashion. These fact collectors could shoot some photos, put together some audio and video, and have a better story than if they were just transferring notes to story copy. They are on the straight news side of the continuum. As we move across the continuum past the feature writer towards the literary nonfiction writer, we have a different breed of writers with different abilities and skill sets.

 These writers see the world in ways most of the rest of us cannot. It takes practice and it takes time because they do far more reporting and research than the reporter who runs out and collects information and instantly pushes it into the paper or onto the web.  It requires the ability to see little details, nuances. Once that writer has to start fumbling around with a camera and tape-recorder and spend times editing all those pieces together, there is little time for the finely crafted written story.

Here is my Kent Hrbek theory of writing. Hrbek, a former Minnesota Twin, was a great first baseman because he was tall, and could stretch, if he had thrown left handed, he would have been even been a better first baseman because it would mean throwing to home, second or third or would be a natural move. On the other hand, if you moved him over 30 feet and asked him to be a second baseman, you would have turned him into a bum. Everything that worked for him as a first baseman would work against him at second especially if he had been left handed, because that’s a not a natural throwing arm to first.

Think of any position on the field; who would want the pitcher to be the catcher too? But that’s what we want from our best reporter writers. We want them not only to play any position but also to play the equivalent of two or three sports — and video,  audio and writing for the page are indeed different sports.  

My advice to the journalism student who wants to be a great writer above all else is to then concentrate your energies in that area. Get some exposure to the other mediums media, but don’t let them turn you into another cog in the machine. Seek your passion. Do all that is necessary to become a great literary journalist, our democracy for sure, and maybe our trade, needs you as much and probably more than we do need all the jacks of all trades.

However, if great nonfiction literary writing, with all the reporting, research and observation skills it entails, is not your first passion, then follow the advice of Curley, Owen, Conley and Murley, learn all the web skills you can because that is where most reporting jobs will be.

Update:  See Rob Curley’s reply to this post. Also see what Mark Hamilton  and everyone else says in the comments below. It’s an excellent discussion. Bryan Murley says at his site:

The consensus would seem to be that there might be places for some pure-play “serious non-fiction writers” in the future of journalism, but they’re going to be few and far between.

He is another update, point of view from Paul Conley, who works with folks who hire young graduates:

…what I hear every day from my clients and other professionals — a college kid with a resume that could have been written in the 1970s is not worth hiring. I don’t care how well he writes. Writing well is not enough.

Earlier Mindy McAdams in a thoughtful post wrote from her Teaching Online Journalism site:

Journalism is a team sport, as Witt encourages us to imagine.

Being a writer is not.

Click on the comments button below and join the discussion,  as of this morning already 1,600 people have visited this discussion.