tuesday, july 27, 2004
Not much new to say
Why don’t we take a look at the future of journalism and blogging a few years down the road? Where will the next generation of journalists be learning their craft and filing their first stories? I think an awful lot of them will learn through the process of blogging. Often, the people who become journalists do so because they like to learn about new things, they like to find stories, and they like to write and pass those stories on. If journalism is in their blood at a young age, they’re going to start blogging long before they set foot in a J-School. School newspapers are passé, school blogs are cool.
I’m a youngish blogger with journalism in my “veins”. But my real stories go into a school newspaper. I helped coax my school’s little paper into life, wrote half of it, and then edited and published it. There’s only been one issue, but it worked. A school blog wouldn’t work at all, however, at least for us. I’ve never even seen a school blog. Face-to-face contact, deadlines, and dead tree distribution made the paper successful by motivating people to write (with a good short-term goal) and getting people to actually read it (since it was in their hands). You don’t get that through a blog.
Anyway, I found newspapering to be very different from blogging. That goes without saying, but it is something to experience. My newspaper and my blog come from the same blood-deep place, but they have such different shapes. The hardest part of writing a newspaper article was turning my notes into something coherent, while I rarely take notes for blog entries. There are so many things to write articles about, if I only had the confidence and time and resources, but entries just require finding something to say.
Heck, I expect that in a couple of years or so those who hire novice journalists are going to want to see what sort of blogging experience they have. Nothing says, “I’m a good, disciplined writer” better than several years of good, disciplined writing, such as on a blog.
Where are those novice journalist-bloggers right now? I don’t see any. I like to keep track of interesting blogs by teenagers, but none of the ten or so I read seem to want to be journalists. I see a bunch of young webdesigners, though.
I think I’ll predict something different for the next generation: a lot of regular old journalists who grok blogs much better than journalists today do. And a lot of really good webdesign.
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