I found this video via KnackeredHack and fell in love it with instantly. About a minute into it I noticed they were talking about the structure of the newsrooms of old. I wondered – how much of that workflow has changed and how much will be utterly unrecognizable in another five years.
Then at around eight minutes into the video they talked about the “country editor.” Maybe I’m reading into it too much – but if you gave the country editor some new tools, he’d be a blogger.
There is some baby among this bathwater. The skill of writing well — that is to say, understanding and targeting the level and attention span of the reader — will always separate the winners from the almost-winners. In the old days, though, the almost-winners became cobblers or lamplighters. The charming bathwater of this message (talk about your almost-winning writing, what a metaphor!) is that air of privilege, almost smugness, as if to say, “Don’t try this at home, kids.” As you say, the country editor’s job is made to look extra daunting. He does everything! He must never sleep. He must not have any employees, apparently. No, it’s much better to be a big paper, and have all that division of labor. Particularly quaint is that the great-granddad of the blog was a 15-pound slab of lead “syndicated” by a guy with a welding mask!
Rick, good writing is not going to disappear. It may even be flourishing. The economics of print may just mean that it is dispersed more, and so we experience that as a decline because of the problems newspapers face. Journalism is re-skilling at the moment and it is hard to say just what resources will benefit from corporate aggregation in the future. Those decisions will be taken by the most skilled (and sometimes lucky) “country editors” who understand both the technological and entrepreneurial opportunities, or hit a rich seam unexpectedly and have the free cashflow to do what they like.
Oh, man. “Women find it hard to compete with men in the newsroom…” so they perpetuate that sentiment by taking up beats such as gardening, food and society. !! Thank goodness for equality in the workplace! 🙂 It’s almost funny now. When was this film made, I wonder? 1930s, 40s?
Apart from that, very interesting insights on old-school journalism.