I don’t think you need me to tell you that journalism has reached a crossroads, and that it has no bloody idea which way to go. It’ll decide, eventually, and move forward at long last. At some point, it may even realize that its survival is pretty much assured no matter which way the big companies go.
But in the meantime, it’s screwing up in the most absurd ways, one of which Rosie DiManno pointed out rather well this week. Newspapers have realized, at long last, that the web lets them do cool things like have slideshows, include video, and do funny, new-fangled things with audio. (It also lets them ignore space restrictions, opening up the door to potentially revolutionary long-form journalism that’s been closed to newspapers for decades; they haven’t noticed that one yet, though others have. Give them time.)
What they’ve not realized, however, is that one journalist, no matter how young, how millennial or who trained in all that cool html-y stuff we’ve been hearing about recently, cannot do it all. At least not well. With a sure ear for a lede, DiManno opens her column with the sudden death of a journalist, longtime Ottawa Sun columnist Earl McRae. It seems he was on the job, in the newsroom, and between the acts of filing an audio add-on of his latest column, and actually writing it. His last words were apparently either “Oh fuck,” or “Oh f—”, depending on where the Star currently draws its line on expletives.
DiManno, posing as a luddite, blames the interweb for depriving us of McRae’s last column, but then immediately gets into the more serious business of lamenting the misguidedness of editors and other managers who try to cut costs and increase output at the same time using the same old frail profit nexus—homo scribendus—as it always has.
Journalists figuring they’re overworked is nothing new. But trying to smash two, three, four or five jobs down the throat of one person is. Behind the scenes, papers have been eliminating things like proofreaders (back in the ’90s), copy editors and page designers (over the last decade), forcing editors to be all three, and often throwing webmaster into the mix as well. The results are visible daily, both online and off.
And now they’re doing it with reporters, too.
Here’s DiManno:
“I’ve watched wire reporters such as my friend Allison Jones from Canadian Press juggle tape recorder (radio), digital camera (still photos), video camera (moving images), notebook and pen (print) in news scrums to fulfill all the responsibilities of her job before finally sitting in front of a computer to write.”
I wouldn’t agree that writing is necessarily a better way to report than in-the-moment video narration or audio recording of salient bits of the story you’re pursuing stitched together into a narrative whole. It just happens to be true at the moment. For the most part, journalists working for print institutions have not learned how to tell their stories very well with pictures and noises. And even when they do, the ones who are good at that will almost certainly not be the same ones who are good at writing. If Madonna has taught us nothing else, we should at least learn from Swept Away and W.E. that abilities in different forms of expression are not only unlikely to share space in the same body, they seem to actually do battle and tear into each other’s very viscera until the resulting work makes the rest of us lose faith in the ability of human spirit to hold back the darkness and forces us to consider the more practical aspects of suicide.
But seriously folks, have you seen Stephen King’s film version of The Shining? How about Ethan Hawkes’ novels? Jewel’s poetry? How much more evidence do we need, how much more do we have to endure, before the powers that be come to terms with the fact that we are a sadly limited species, and that making a reporter’s job contingent on their ability to put together a little movie and a behind-the-scenes podcast while writing to deadline is unreasonable and possibly actionable.
It’s easy to frame DiManno’s anti-juggling argument (it’s one of several she makes in this especially acidulous column) as fogeyism. Much as I hate to use this term to describe one of her aperus, it’s basic common sense.
I have every confidence that journalism will survive. I’d even be willing to go further that the substance and essence of it will end up changing very little and that, when the silicon settles, the only real difference will be the delivery system, and this I hope very brief age of the Swiss army journalist will be seen for what it is, a misstep on a bumpy patch of the same road journalism’s been following for centuries.
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Bert Archer is the Media Critic for the Toronto Standard.
