Being a multimedia writer without forgetting about traditional rules of the journalism is what matters in modern media world. The columnist of the “Sun-Times” Laura Washington was talking about this and other things to the students of Southern Illinois University.
I was listening to a lot of things Laura Washington said and had the feeling she was reading my mind. “We forget whom we are writing to. Sometimes we write to each other or we are just showing off,” she said. In the newspaper I worked with in Ukraine I sometimes had similar argument when talking to my editor. Editor’s excuse was that this is what our readers want to know. The question is if our readers were really asked what they want to know about. Of course, with modern technologies it is somehow easier to get the feedback from the readers, since they can comment on the articles they read online. On the other hand, this can worsen the situation because readers do not usually comment on the information in the article itself.
As Laura said, it is important to talk to people and not to do all the work on the phone or over the Internet. I have experienced that myself. When I had to go and talk to people about one issue, I usually ended up with more ideas for my future stories suggested by people whom I interviewed. Talking to people in person is also the best way to develop your life-long sources.
Interviews via e-mail are not good because journalists cannot ask harsh questions, Washington said. Even if they do so, they may end up with having no answers to their questions. I totally agree to this. But several times I did interviews via e-mail. This was very handy since those people I have interviewed were not even in Ukraine. If not via e-mail, I would not get any information from them.
Specialization in journalism is really valuable, Laura Washington said. Her point reminded me of Tomas Patterson’s talk. He also mentioned about journalists having narrow specializations. As I have said before, I have one problem with that. It seems newsrooms are getting smaller these days and journalists are being laid off a lot. Thus there should be writers being able to write about more than one topic, I think. Modern journalist should be multimedia as well as multitasking.
What strike me the most in what Laura Washington was saying is about journalists always making the assumptions. We kind of know how our story would look like without even starting our research on it. We also assume politicians are bad and there is not a good thing to write about them. I guess this is the “disease” of the journalists in every country. I used to work with a journalist that hated all the politicians regardless their party affiliation. He was writing about what their bad deeds were without paying attention to what they did well. After some time working in the field I started to realize I was turning into him to some extent. The good excuse in this situation is again that the readers want to know about this. The same question – who ever asks the readers what they want to know?
Media is definitely moving into new direction. This is what we see and experience these days. This is what Laura Washington and Tom Patterson were talking about. In this situation we as the students should gain as much knowledge about different media as possible. I am sure we are going to use all of them in our future work.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Being Modern without Forgetting Traditional
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