Let the Digital Natives Speak
A young staffer on the digital side of a legacy broadcast outfit said, “All these old white men like to scream and wave their arms that journalism is dying. They say, Oh my, it’s dying, guys. But they’re the ones cutting budgets and trying to do things the same way they’ve always done things. Did that work out okay for you, guys? Shit no, it didn’t. We need to move on from how people did it in the fucking 1600s. Get over that shit . . . . I want to be like, Your model died, dude. Seriously, we need to reinvent journalism as we know it. Throw out the playbook.” -- CJRIs Mr. "Throw out the playbook" correct? Let's read on. Later in the same piece we hear from his colleagues:
“I don’t want to be Pollyannaish. We’ve lost a lot of people and lost a lot of capacity. It’s scary. But I don’t sit around and pine for the old days,” Archibald says. “I am a columnist. I’ve got my head down worrying about what tomorrow’s column is going to be about. I don’t have time to worry about the rest of it.”
His colleague across the newsroom, Carol Robinson, 54, is another survivor of the 2012 cull, and has been writing about cops and public safety for most of her three decades at the paper. She’s got what Archibald calls a “beautiful sickness,” in that she files more stories than many reporters can fathom—and has the out-of-sight readership numbers to show for it. -- CJR
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
