Bad Blogger

While journalism is certainly embracing online distribution fairly quickly, I wonder about the value of teaching new journalists to write for the Internet before teaching them to write for print. According to the Inside Higher Ed article, many college news publications are exclusively online. Many are also blog-style, where content revolves around columns that focus on student interests rather than actual news. While there is nothing really wrong with this, I wonder about using it as a learning ground for new journalists.

It seems to me that many of the crucial news values and skills that make good journalists develop while working with in print rather than online. For instance, concise writing is critical for journalists, whether on the Internet or in a newspaper. But in an exclusively online environment, motivation to keep to the point dwindles dramatically. There aren’t any length requirements and stories can span on for pages and pages without any real extra cost.

The emphasis on timeliness is also affected. While it could be argued that online media makes publishing news in a timely fashion even more of a race, it also skews deadlines. How long does a reporter get to cover a story? When do you publish stories? Unless content is updated at one specific time every day and all stories must be in by then, deadlines move to the backburner. There is always the safety net of “Oh, we can just upload that story in an hour, or in a day.” Editors can still enforce strict deadlines, but online publications lose the get-things-done-now element of print publications.

And while I couldn’t necessarily prove it, I think online publications may also cause journalists to lessen the amount of time and effort they put into the completeness of their stories. Print has a very definite element of finality about it. Once it’s in ink, you can’t make alterations. On the other hand, the content of online publications can be altered, trimmed or added to whenever anyone wants. Journalists for online publications may still go for the most complete, polished story they can on the first run, but they don’t have to. The ability to add details later or fix shaky facts could, especially for new writers, create dangerous temptations.

I think online publications are great. I mean no disrespect to writers who write exclusively online, but I don’t think it’s as good a place to learn journalism as print. It’s not impossible to learn good journalism online, but print forces you learn timeliness, conciseness and completeness, among other things. I think it’s better for writers to learn with print and then move online once they’ve gotten a handle on the craft. Now, whether or not journalism values will change because of the new rules on the Internet could change my argument completely. But that’s another blog post.