Andrew Nusca offers a media reality check to the conventional wisdom that today’s journalist must be a camera-toting, video-editing, pen-and-paper wielding jack-of-all-trades:
As new media has increased in popularity and usage, this myth has populated of the multi-talented reporter — you know, the one carrying all the gear a few paragraphs back. And while it’s certainly an ideal, it’s not a necessity. In fact, it’s barely a reality.Thus brings my first point of this New Media Reality Check: most news organizations simply don’t operate that way.
Nusca uses Henry Ford’s Model-T assembly line to draw an analogy to modern news production:
The same thing applies to publications, moreso as it gets bigger. Whether the publication in question is a newspaper or a magazine or a radio/TV station or a website, the assembly line theory of the Industrial Age still holds true: a writer reports and creates the story, an editor edits it, a photographer shoots art for it, a production editor lays out a template for the story to appear and another editor (or two) looks at the entire package, all while being fact-checked and copy-edited by another person dedicated to that task.
Nusca provides some common sense advice for new and seasoned journalists unsure of whether they have the skills to endure. Pursue the skills you need for your particular niche, he advises. And if you want to be an online journalist:
