Streamline Training & Documentation: 21st-Century Journalism I: New Ways of Consuming News

Monday, May 15, 2006

21st-Century Journalism I: New Ways of Consuming News

The recent sale of Knight Ridder's newspapers has been seen as a particularly stark sign that the newspaper business is weakening.

But then you read stories like one today in the New York Times that reports robust growth in enrollment at US schools of journalism. This trend suggests that the distress in the industry is actually part of a quite healthy shift to making good use of all the possibilities opened up by digital technology.

I'm sure my own recent experience is typical for people who are regular consumers of news.

Papers I used to buy daily I now mostly read online. All the online news sites are free, except for the Wall Street Journal, to which I have a subscription, and the site for my local paper, which I continue to buy daily from racks around town.

I have a small group of blogs that I read daily, mostly to keep up with discussions of political affairs. The blogs I give time to are run by people who are serious about accuracy, good writing, and logic.

I have a Yahoo page set up to receive RSS feeds from news sources I want to check daily.

I check Google news from time to time during the day to see if there is any breaking news I want to catch up on that I haven't been alerted to on my Yahoo page.

According to the Times' report, the students enrolling in journalism schools are optimistic about long-term opportunities. As Lee B. Becker, a journalism professor at the University of Georgia, says, "Students are interested in writing. They're interested in the broader sense of what the media are and what role they play in society, and those are the things that drive them, not hearing about Knight Ridder dealing with a stockholders' revolt."

For me as a training specialist, one particularly significant aspect of this story is its flip side, namely a reduced ability of newspapers to provide adequate on-the-job training. Partly, this is due to lack of on-staff expertise at the cutting edge of new media techniques and technology. Partly, it is due to budget cuts that reduce time experienced staff are able to devote to training and mentoring.

It is to newspapers' credit that they are seeking out graduates who have been schooled in both the basics of journalism and the "attitude of working in teams and producing content for different audiences" that journalism schools are fostering. (The quote is from Mike McKean, chairman of the convergence journalism faculty at the University of Missouri.)

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Labels: Journalism

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