On one of my mailing lists the other day (Gads, just saying mailing list instead of Twitter account or Facebook page makes me feel out of step), someone asked whether people at newspapers who consider themselves “print-only” or “web-only” are dead in the water, that newspapers are moving toward convergence.
Isn’t the asking of this question alone a sign that you are dead in the water yourself?
I was at a meeting the other day with local media professionals and the newspaper design maven at the local paper said that “silos” didn’t exist at the paper any more and that we need to prepare college grads for the new reality.
This means that we need to prepare them for life as a mojo or at least prepare our so-called “print” majors for a career with multimedia. With flip video cameras, the iPhone, digital audio recorders, Audacity, netbooks and such, how can this question even be asked today?
According to Bob Papper, who yearly does a “Future of News” study that he presents at RTNDA, newspapers lost an estimated 5,000 or so jobs in 2009, approximately 11 percent of newsworkers. TV stations lost only about 1.5 percent.
Stories hitting my computer recently include ones about how we are re-entering the world pre-Gutenberg when words were less important than oral communication and how the Ventura (CA) newspaper is using the iPhone (and other assorted gadgets to make the iPhone functional) to record video in the field and upload it immediately to their web site.
It is clear to me that the word is in danger of losing out to the image. In fact, that’s the title of an excellent book from 1998: The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word.
The newsroom is already converged, baby.
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