Reporting is important and it always will be
No matter how much I stress the importance that journalists need to learn Web and new media skills, there is one thing I will always mention: reporting skills are a must. The world will always need people who can work leads and cultivate sources. That’s a given.

And no amount of video editing or programming skills will ever make you a journalist. You have to be a journalist and a reporter first.

It’s important for journalists and j-school students to realize that the ability to be a reporter is timeless. It’s the method of your reporting that isn’t.

Just as television deeply impacted radio news, the Web will deeply impact print journalism. But all of it is still journalism and all those formats need reporters.

The key to succeeding in the 21st century will be combining solid reporting skills with being media and platform agnostic.

After all if you can be a newspaper reporter, why can’t you be a Web reporter? It’s simple, you can.

Goodbye to Newspapers?
Are newspapers on their way out and have all forms of journalism lost their way?

Russell Baker’s New York Times review of “When the Press Fails: Political Power and the New Media from Iraq to Katrina” by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, highlights some of the best points of the book. It’s a good read for people trying to understand the downfall of newspapers.

Much of the problems with newspapers go far beyond editorial issues and a lack of new media savvy. Most of those issues can be attributed to the business end and its narrow-minded pursuit of profits above all. Journalism wasn’t founded around making money.

Journalism was, and should be, about informing the public and keeping government and businesses honest. Obviously, journalism needs to make some money, but it’s only goal was never supposed to be just profits. John S. Carroll, former editor of the Los Angeles Times said it well a few years ago:

We have seen a narrowing of the purpose of the newspaper in the eyes of its owner. Under the old local owners, a newspaper’s capacity for making money was only part of its value. Today, it is everything. Gone is the notion that a newspaper should lead, that it has an obligation to its community, that it is beholden to the public….

Someday, I suspect, when we look back on these forty years, we will wonder how we allowed the public good to be so deeply subordinated to private gain….

What do the current owners want from their newspapers?— the answer could not be simpler: Money. That’s it.

Can journalism be saved from the ravages of Wall Street? I don’t know. It may need to crash and burn and then rise from the ashes to become what it was supposed to be — what it needs to be.

Rob Curley of the Washington Post has said there are only five publishers in the U.S. he would work for. Five! The rest don’t get new media or don’t care about journalism or are falling apart.

The Web is an amazing format for journalism. It allows for continuous coverage, interaction and new ways of telling stories. The companies that aren’t beholden to quarterly profits will be the ones that make the biggest waves in the coming years.

My brother, who works for Tribune Co., once told me that shareholders expect the high profit margin that its holding typically got, which is why Tribune kept cutting costs and staff. They had to maintain that fat profit margin.

That was their obligation and it shows within many of Tribune’s holdings. Carroll left the Times because he refused to cut anymore staff.

Newspapers do need to embrace new media and deliver the content that people want. But the publishers, owners of papers, corporate boards, etc need to allow editors and journalists to be able to create that content.

If they don’t, everyone loses.