"As a medium, print is on an irreversible decline relative to digital. We are headed for an inflection point at which print newspapers as we knew them in the past will be unsustainable.
Like it or not, print must change.
If you are a wire editor or features editor, your odds of surviving in such a position until retirement are slim to none. Those jobs are obsolete. We can not save a system in which thousands of people sit around reinventing the wheel in parallel processes all around the country.
The Tribune Company's bankruptcy raises the urgency of facing this issue, but it will be an issue for everyone sooner or later. This is just another case of "the future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed."
If you imagine that jobs will simply move from a print focus to an Internet focus, you're wrong. Some jobs, like the wire editor and the features editor, will disappear. The Internet presents us with completely new tasks, requiring different skill sets."
[...]
"This isn't a case of good guys (journalists) against the bad guys (management).
I know some people are offended by the description of print production jobs as "manufacturing," but they are. Newsrooms of the past were integrated parts of newspaper factories. We're leaving that behind.
I understand the concerns about quality as copy editing becomes minimal. I worked as a copy editor for years. In some situations my job was more rewriting than editing, as talented gatherers of news are not always talented tellers of stories.
If you are one of those talented gatherers of news who can't write clean publishable copy, you can pretty much consider your job to be in the same at-risk category as wire editing and features editing."
This excerpt is from an interesting article by Steve Yelvington, a lifelong journalist and now a strategist for a media company.
Note: T-shirt image from Cafe Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment