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Somebody, plz, tell me what the f she means.....

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Dave Kindred, Apr 10, 2008.

  1. dixiehack

    dixiehack Well-Known Member

    I was thinking of the one where everybody is lying on the floor in a darkened room trying to change the company. When the boss asks how they'll do it, that same girl (uber cute, btw) replies "We haven't ideated that yet."
     
  2. Frank_Ridgeway

    Frank_Ridgeway Well-Known Member


    Why do you accept this, Dave? I reject it for at least four reasons:

    1.) As long as newspapers pay newspaper wages and hire from journalism schools, you'll be getting nothing new. Have you spoken to any journalism classes or read any college news media (even of the underground variety) or listened to college radio in the past few years? It is like looking into the chimp cage -- less evolved creatures mimicking the same buzzwords and platitudes already found in newsrooms, using the same techniques, only less polished. Their media attempt to reach their peers the same way their professional counterparts do. If there were anything worthwhile being produced in those venues, newspapers would have stolen it by now. If newspapers want something new, they are fishing the wrong ponds and using the wrong bait and not enough of it.

    2.) Most of us started out on smaller papers that, for economic reasons, had newsrooms that were primarily young. "Attracting young readers" has been the mantra for as long as I've been in newspapers, and newspapers put out by young staffs have proved no more adept than anyone else as accomplishing this. I landed my first full-time job in 1979 when I was 19. The editor was 29, and almost everyone in the newsrooms (two papers) was somewhere between those ages. At the time, the papers had more than 100,000 circulation and today they don't exist. We modeled ourselves after larger papers because all of us wanted to move on to the next level. That is, individually, what eager young careerists do, then and now. We were just like older papers, only with more typos and worse decision-making. Young readers didn't like us. Old readers didn't like us. Middle-age readers didn't like us.

    3.) What you have running large newsrooms now are generally bald guys (or their female equivalents) who have trained themselves to spew that latest managementspeak that will help them separate themselves from the other fossils in the building, at least superficially. But half of them attained their status by telling those who outrank them exactly what they want to hear, and they tend to hire and promote people just like them in that regard. Again, what you get are younger versions of the same model. And what is that model? Suddenly, after two or three decades of ardent career climbing, the editor of the high school paper or president of the chess club has finally attained the long-elusive status of hippest person in the room? I think not.

    4.) We've seen over the past 10 years not new ideas but the recycling of gimmicks that already failed in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s. The people proposing such "innovations" may either be too unschooled in newspaper history to know any better, or they may just have nothing else to suggest and they hope like hell no one remembers that the paper tried hyper-local in 1975, "blew up the newsroom" in 1980, bought out the old-timers in 1990 and got nowhere.

    It's not the technology and it's not the age of the workers that are the problems, it is passionless, sterile products that are doomed to that fate when constipated bureaucrats are in charge. And that is generally the case whether you are talking daily newspaper, alternative weekly or student newspaper. It leads to dullness no matter the age of the creators. You can hire a bunch of kids, but history shows they'll most often be the wrong kids -- wannabecools rather than the real thing.
     
  3. SportsDude

    SportsDude Active Member

    I think she means that pop culture hip and technological savy psychobabble is the way to reach new readers.
     
  4. Appgrad05

    Appgrad05 Active Member

    Another day, another person that knows how to save the industry. ...
     
  5. captzulu

    captzulu Member

    Here's the link to the whole column, if anyone wants to read that excerpt in its context.

    http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003784660

    I think this excerpt is a bit more indicative of the point she was trying to make in the column:

    "The lesson is that we who love the pursuit of objectivity, truth, and storytelling and don’t want to see the fourth branch of government fall into the hands of unwieldy citizen journalists “reporting” on hyperlocal knitting circles all need to get more nimble. Young journalists are inherently great at this, but when they finally secure those tough-to-get jobs in newsrooms they often wind up disillusioned by the collision of unseasoned enthusiasm vs. cynical veterans and a culture framed by losing and lackluster leadership. "

    While her column smacks of someone who was frustrated about not being able to effect any rapid change at her newspaper and newspapers' slow pace of innovation (not a surprise, and can't say she doesn't have reasons to be frustrated), I think she makes a good point about many newspaper efforts to court young readers. Those efforts are often based on the "let's give them more teen-oriented stories on A1" or "let's launch a youth page" approach. She argues that the problem isn't so much editorial content as it is the method of delivering the content. She's saying that we need to deliver our content to where the young readers are, not try to use gimmicks to lure them to a platform that they aren't in the habit of using. I can agree with that point. However, I disagree with the other point she seemed to be trying to make: that print journalism is going out of style. While I fully appreciate the extra power and dimensions that multimedia opens up for journalism, the fact that much of the journalism content that is delivered via the social networks today is still in the form of the written word would seem to dispute her point.
     
  6. espnguy

    espnguy Member

    Sounds like the journalistic version of socialized medicine ;D
     
  7. ink-stained wretch

    ink-stained wretch Active Member

    Newspapers need fewer managers and more leaders.

    Spelberg was once asked how he knew that the first 15 minutes of "Saving Private Ryan" was what the audience wanted. His reply was along the lines of I don't care what the audience wants. I know what I want.

    It helps to be a creative genius, of course.

    Back in the day, prior to budget meetings, I would call home and ask the wife what they were talking about at her job. That was my one-person focus group. It worked surprisingly well — likely because I filtered the results through my own prejudices.

    Were I still management scum, I'd be calling both my sons to find out what people were talking about. But because I'm back on the street, I've got a pretty good idea.
     
  8. Barsuk

    Barsuk Active Member

    This was too good to go unrecognized.
     
  9. Mediator

    Mediator Member

    The ONLY reasons newspaper managers care about this is because the corporate bosses demand a better return for the shareholders. So screw the journalism, what's the product that will get us more money.

    So pull apart the beast with the stated goal of repackaging. But this quote is a giveaway...

    "Young journalists are inherently great at this, but when they finally secure those tough-to-get jobs in newsrooms they often wind up disillusioned by the collision of unseasoned enthusiasm vs. cynical veterans and a culture framed by losing and lackluster leadership."

    Kill the old. They ALL have to be gone or else they will poison those terrific youngsters who have the god-given instincts to save the product!
     
  10. Piotr Rasputin

    Piotr Rasputin New Member

    Reads differently in context. Thanks for the link, captzulu.

    I found myself agreeing with a lot of her rant, though it read like a young person who feels they have great ideas, but who is frustrated because the old guard does things their way and doesn't want to hear it. Young people always think that "If we JUST get rid of that older generation, we can change the world!" Witness this year's presidential election.

    She's apparently part of the wave of people in journalism, both young and old, who are intrigued by the possibilities of multimedia, and who allow that to make them declare the death of print. But as we have discussed here many times, print is losing much of its relevance.

    "Print" being defined as the actual print newspaper, of course. NOT the written word. I don't think she's preaching the death of the written word as much as she using "multimedia storytelling" as a catchall term for various types of news on the net, including great writing.

    Her early points about slow change at newspapers are well-taken; again, just read the threads on this very site.

    That said, even with full context, her conclusion remains chock-full of unnecessarily pompous wording, especially use of "organically." I can see why she lost some readers there.

    I do think that we shouldn't dismiss her ideas out of hand. Newspaper journalism is where it is because of years of dismissing ideas that didn' t jibe with what had been done before.
     
  11. lono

    lono Active Member

    Never trust anyone over 35! [/1960sflashback]
     
  12. Peytons place

    Peytons place Member

    Unfortunately for this analysis, young people do not want "fair and accurate accounts of the relevant news and analysis of our time." They want to know what Britney Spears is doing and who Paris Hilton is doing, but mostly they want to see pictures and stories about themselves, because they are the most important people in the world. Good luck with that. I know, here's a novel idea. Let's forget about these MySpace fanatics, and remember the people who actually DO read newspapers and give them stuff they find entertaining and news they could use. Instead, we alienate loyal readers in an attempt to snag a group we're never gonna get.
     
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