My take on Week 1 readings

As promised, here’s my take on this week’s readings (feel free to post a comment, but it’s not required. We'll keep the graded discussions on Blackboard):

For journalists, the future is here and they all better get used to it or decide to do something else.
While knowing how to report and convey a story remains the most important skill, journalists now  need to be competent in how to produce stories over multiple platforms to find jobs. That's certainly true for newspapers, especially here in Michigan. The paper I worked for, The Flint Journal, went from being a daily paper to three days a week. The Ann Arbor News closed with its parent company opening an Web-based publication called Ann Arbor.com. The Detroit papers have cut back their home delivery. Hundreds of employees, including journalists like myself, lost their jobs. With these changes, all the publications announced they are trumpeting their Web-presences to replace the print cutback. Accordingly, the now smaller staffs are seeking journalists who can do more than just write and report. So as Chapter 1 points out, a key ability will be able to recognize which stories will work best in each medium.

Most of these changes reflect the tough economic conditions of Michigan and the new reality that there will be fewer ad dollars to support news organizations. Globally that means the prediction that the last newspaper will cease publication in 2043 might be a whole lot sooner. What it means for young journalists is that there likely will be fewer jobs to compete for. But there still also might be some opportunity because many veterans, like myself, decided to change careers.  From a larger perspective, as pointed out in the readings, there's some concern that the cutbacks at newspapers will hurt our democracy because most online sites currently do a lot less original reporting. Web site providers say their growth will allow them to hire larger staffs, and that's happening at national Web publications, like the Huffington Post and Politico. But so far it doesn't seem to be true just yet on a more local level like here in Michigan.