Being that I am catching up on a lot of journal readings and responses, I thought I would spam the blog-o-sphere with my thoughts on the range of issues pervasive to journalism today.
This article, by veteran Chris Masters inspired the following. I feel like I've said some of it before but maybe that's because some of the issues are deserving of a lot of hot air, though I wouldn't shy away from being told it's merely because I am a repetitive sort.
Chris Masters’ discussion of the media environment in which he developed as a journalist was certainly an eye-opening read. While much of the course content of the last year in particular, but obviously the preceding two as well, has been focused on ensuring we are equipped as journalists of tomorrow with the necessary skills to vacillate between key mediums of journalism, I had never really seen the industry as it is now as constantly evolving in response to a number of influences.
That his career spanned 43 years and was almost entirely at the ABC was impressive to me. Masters even acknowledged that that sort of longevity is almost unheard of today and I would bemoan that, if it weren’t for a knowledge of my own almost-ADD capacity to stick with one thing for a period of time. But in saying that, it impressed me for reasons far beyond an admiration of a personally lacking perseverant nature.
43 years in any career would be hard-going, but to stick with one that is subject to the ebb and flow of consumer popularity while maintaining a sense of dignity and pride in that work is certainly admirable. Certainly, too, it is almost as enviable as incredible that in his day, Masters’ could have become a foreign correspondent straight out of school.
Both those things seem to reflect an era less complicated by the multi-platform-digital-high-tech state of today. From a young age, I have been (almost) conditioned to believe that I will go through four (or is it five now?) career changes in my time. I don’t believe that sort of thing does much to help the lessening attention spans of my peers and the generations following us, but it is widely recognised that as a collective we lack the ability to endure much at all for longer than an ad-break.
In saying that, I am not deviating from the discussion but rather pulling together the strands of my experience to illuminate a point: the nature of journalism is changing to reflect this. The option of being print OR broadcast journalists no longer exists because we (as a generation) can do it all. We can do it all at once, too. Heck, we can do it all at once from one device if we have the access to the technology!
So Masters’ experience comes from a time when putting in hours, days and weeks for a story was paramount to success, but is of some value to those of us who can achieve recognition for the most banal of banalities in an instant – before losing it in the next. We achieve recognition for a status update on facebook, or a tweet, or a youtube video, or a blog entry, which are just as swiftly buried by a torrent of newer, more up-to-the-micro-second tweet/video/blog/status update.
So the old quality over quantity adage applicable to Masters’ generation has given way to quantity trumping quality to keep up to date (or seriously, up-to-second, which is SO important – you couldn’t be still ‘lol’-ing at Kate’s hoax party when the hits of the next Trent-from-Punchy video on youtube are already beginning to dwindle), and the nature of broadcast journalism reflects that. Radio journalists like Latika Bourke tweet during Question Time, not only to share the more amusing he-said-she-said’s of QT but to plug her news bulletins or stories. In the process, she is exposing not only herself to a wider audience but the nature of broadcast journalism today: you have to straddle a variety of mediums to engage with an audience, who are tweeting from their iPhone while listening to a podcast while filming the next minute-of-fame youtube video who lack the time it takes to tie up their shoelaces but who can and are doing a million other things simultaneously. Masters’ experience is valuable to those of us about to be churned out into the multi-platform-digi-journo industry though – imagine the strength and viability of broadcast journalism if those of us who could do it all, could do it with style, dignity and loyalty?
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