In case you didn’t notice, the media industry is in the throes of a revolution. At the forefront of this you’ll find journalists, and many of them are just as resistant to change as the organisations that employ them.
1. Shit’s changing and we’re not
About two years ago I got really bored with journalism (and publishing). It was all so stable. “Oh print is dead, online is growing… blah blah blah”. I’d been hearing it since 1999, but nothing really happened.
We repurposed a few print stories for online, wrote more news to feed a newsletter (and then unwittingly lied about its open rate to clients – many still do). We did a few website redesigns, cut some magazine frequency and most recently minced around with social media. But let’s be honest, it was all fairly uneventful.
As journalists we worked on our production lines, banging out the same shit we’ve been banging out for years. We weren’t crafting by hand anymore, we were assembling like a bunch of robots you’d see in a car factory.
As journalists we now stand at a crossroads. But we do have options. We can continue down the same path we’ve long trodden and gradually be downsized to obscurity. We can turn right and move to a competitor (but let’s face it, they’re screwed too). Or turn left and adapt (massively). Not many of us are turning left at the moment.
Normally this is the point when a red-faced hack waves a finger at “the bumbling layers of management” bemoaning their lack of investment. This is swiftly followed by the same journalists declaring they have zero desire to understand the commercial world (the forces of which pay their salaries), because of the ultimate trump card – editorial integrity. Problem is, no one gives a toss about editorial integrity anymore and those that do (a few readers here and there) by and large don’t pay anything for it… so they don’t truly value it.
In short, old school journalism rules don’t apply anymore. And our industry is full of old school journalists.
2. Words are …
