The Future of Journalism: a joint Media Alliance & Walkley Foundation initiative

We had a walking, talking example of the journalist of the future at our Blueprint for Progress forums in Perth and Adelaide over the weekend, when Stephen Brook, the Media Guardian’s deputy editor, appeared live by satellite for a chat about recent developments in the UK industry.

The most recent development at that point (but not now, so fast do things move on Fleet Street) was the decision by Rupert Murdoch to pull the plug on The London Paper, the free sheet he set up some years ago to go up against the Evening Standard, which had just launched its own free sheet, London Lite.

Brooky said he broke the story in a few pars for the Guardian’s media website but forgot to Twitter it. Once a more nimble colleague got it out on the Twittersphere, it caused a flurry of activity, which was picked up by the BBC, who dragged Stephen in for a TV interview, followed by ITN’s London Tonight. Meanwhile he and some Guardian colleagues chatted about it in the regular media podcast. He then wrote it up for the newspaper.

As he noted on his Facebook page: “London Paper closes. I'm online, in print, on podcast, on TV. Four platforms in five hours. Sheesh.”

Across the satellite divide he told us: “I was only formally trained to do one of those disciplines. The rest I picked up on the job.”

The opportunity to acquire new skills was one of the things we talked about at length in our Future of Journalism: Blueprint for Progress forums in Perth and Adelaide on Friday and Monday. We put together some stellar panels of journalists, academics and bloggers and the debate was lively and wide-ranging. I’m not going to blow our own trumpet – read blogger Tama Leaver’s conclusions here.

But it was great to hear Dominique Schwartz get into a panel, which included the ABC’s head of news for South Australia, Rick Keegan, over the whole question of multi-tasking and quality. How can a reporter expect to go out on a story, film their own interviews, edit the footage, record voice-overs and pieces to camera and do all the rest of the jobs they once had an experienced crew to do, without sacrificing those extra phone calls that might make the story even better, she asked (and I’m paraphrasing furiously here as I don’t have a transcript yet!)

And she has a point. It’s a bit like the business model outlined by Jeff Jarvis, in which journalists are supposed to double as small business people. Sometimes (most of the time?) journalists should be left to do what they do best, which is find stuff out and write, tweet, broadcast about it. Surely the production work is best left to people who are professionally trained to do it. Ditto the marketing.

That said, Tim Burrowes reckons he works a six-day week, 12 hours a day on Mumbrella – and it’s easy to see how that would be possible. But not everyone wants to work those hours and not everyone wants (or has the commercial nous) to spend a portion of their lives effectively doing deals.

Tim was also a speaker at our conference, which will be online soon. Watch this space. Here's his take on the gig.

So I was intrigued to read today this piece in Reuters, pointing to Stanford University university research which found “broad-based incompetence” among people who tried to multi-task. Or, in geek-speak:

“Results showed that heavy media multi-taskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multi-taskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set.”

Now I’m not saying that Brooky is not very good at both writing and broadcasting – he is, which is clearly from some innate ability – but what if you threw a bit of desk editing into the mix? Spooky. And more so when you consider that a lot of employers want their staff to perform a panoply of roles while also saying – in public at least – that they have a commitment to maintaining quality. Well, we know from the amount of subbing errors that appear online that this is not going to work out. This is not just a former sub-editor speaking: reporters need editing (and a lolly goes to the first 10 people to write in and spot the deliberate subbing errors in this screed…). Reporters need subbing, there is “craft” to “craft editing” and some writers are best at just that: writing. If we want to give our audiences the best quality content, perhaps we should bear that in mind.

Incidentally, the Alliance is in the throes of designing a series of multi-media training courses which we plan to roll out next year, so watch this space for further details.

On a different note, this from Roy Greenslade in today’s Grauniad (and, yes, that was a deliberate error): He asks: “Will star journalists really attract paying customers to online newspapers?” and comes up with a big fat: “No!” He points to the movements of various big-name British journos from masthead to masthead without affecting the numbers. But I think this is a tad naïve of him. As he himself goes on to admit, in an online environment, people flit from paper to paper depending on who is sending them there (Google, Facebook or a friend’s recommendations) or whether they want their prejudices confirmed by a particular columnist. So perhaps star journos might attract traffic… they represent an entry point to a news website, which is what they are all looking for.

But will people pay for the pleasure? The jury’s out, says Roy.

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