Mid-career professionals can help lead the way to a new era

Posted on November 1, 2007 by Howard Owens

Writing for E-Media Tidbits, Maryn McKenna says that many mid-career professionals are abandoning the trade.

The lean, quick, lower-cost jobs of “Journalism 2.0″ don’t make sense to many mid-career journalists. To be clear, the “don’t make sense” part is not “I despise technology and resist it.” Rather, it is: “I do not see opportunities to display my long-honed skills and expertise.” And as a result, some newsrooms that are attempting the shift to the Web are losing substantial numbers of mid-career people.

In my travels around the industry, making my own observations, talking with other executives, the personnel/cultural adoption issues isn’t with the veterans. The people I affectionately call the “gray hairs” (I have a few myself), are eager for new challenges and are excited by what they’re learning online. They are more realistic about the challenges we face.

The cub reporters, not so much. The kids right out of college, they’re the ones most likely to cling to a romanticism about being the crusading print reporter. When I talk about web-first publishing, they’re the ones most likely to say, “but won’t we scoop ourselves?” Or when handed a video camera, they say, “but I got in this business to be a writer.”

I’ve heard from more than one fellow executive the tale of promising young reporters taking jobs in PR because that somehow seemed more palatable doing this online stuff.

Here’s the part I agree with:

Web-based means of storytelling, and hyperlocal stories, do offer such opportunities. But my experience is that many writers don’t believe it. Instead, they feel their work being squeezed into from-above templates that devalue the best skills they have to offer.

Stories are where you find them, and looking back at the best-read stories I ever wrote, they weren’t found in state capitols or city halls.

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  • anonymous

    What about the folks like myself: Five years into a career with a varied journalism background and a desire to embrace all things multimedia who ask, plead, beg to be included in new media projects or allowed to contribute new ideas but are turned way due to budget constraints, risk-averse editors and hopelessly outdated technology?

  • http://www.collegemediainnovation.org/blog Bryan Murley

    Sorry about the previous comment. Delete it. Here’s the corrected version:

    Howard,

    I wrote about this here and Rob Curley mentioned the same thing in his speech to college journalists last week here.

    I do think anonymous has a point, but there are organizations in the industry who grab those individuals who are looking for new challenges. Sadly, there seem to be too many who think the solution is just to hire the recent college grad instead of training the current staff.

  • http://www.howardowens.com/ Howard Owens

    As Curley has said, it’s about mindset not skill set.

  • http://artistspassion.com Wendy Withers

    Right now, I’m finishing up my degree in journalism. My fear isn’t about producing video and sound clips or posting on Web sites; I’m embracing the new technologies. My fear is that I won’t find a job when I graduate; I’ve heard it’s easier to get hired for PR jobs than for journalism jobs, which is the only reason why I’d consider going into PR. I’m taking journalism classes because I write; I’ll work for who pays me to do so.

  • http://www.contentious.com/archives/2007/11/01/links-for-2007-11-01/ contentious.com – links for 2007-11-01

    [...] howardowens.com: media blog » Blog Archive » Mid-career professionals can help lead the way to a new era “The people I affectionately call the “gray hairs” (I have a few myself), are eager for new challenges and are excited by what they’re learning online. They are more realistic about the challenges we face. The cub reporters, not so much.” (tags: tidbits+fodder generations journalism media+evolution trends web2.0 change) [...]

  • http://www.howardowens.com/ Howard Owens

    Wendy, there is no shortage of first-year jobs for bright, ambitious reporters with a webcentric mindset … newsrooms are desperate to find these people, as the job boards show.

    If you’re good and willing to relocate, we can find a place for you in GateHouse.

  • http://artistspassion.com Wendy Withers

    Howard,

    Relocating isn’t the problem. To me, that’s part of the excitement of graduation- imagining where I’m going to end up.

  • Stuck in the sticks

    Unlike Wendy (comment 6), I’m less willing to relocate. I am mid-career, but more than willing to lead the way into a new, electronic era. But I’ve no support. None from IT. None from my executive editor.

    I know: go where there is opportunity. But I’m locked into my geography; I carry all that mid-level baggage such as kids in school, mortgages and caring for aging parents that keep me from relocating. On top of that, I live in a rural area without much opportunity for even other print gigs.

    Thus, it’s against my will than I’m among the blinkered paper dinosaurs.

    Perhaps the new era will launch quickly enough for someone like me to work remotely, however, even though I keep a blog and try to keep trained up during my off time, my skill set tarnishes as I type this.

    I wonder how many willing but restrained mid-level leaders like me there are.

  • http://www.marynmckenna.com maryn mckenna

    Thanks for picking up on the Poynter tidbit. I want to be really clear that what I’m hearing from recently-former colleagues is not that they don’t want to do new things. In a lot of cases, they’re panting to do the new things, but can’t find any space in the newsroom in which to create.
    What they don’t like is that the concepts for what’s going on the Web are all top-down, which is about as anti-2.0 as you could get, when you think about it. Especially when the control from above is so tight that they’re not allowed even to blog – on their own, not on the paper’s site.
    The message they say they are getting is: “We don’t want what you used to do; and we’re not interested in your ideas of what we could do next, because we already thought of that.” And so they bail.

  • http://www.timgruber.com Tim

    As a cub I have no problem embracing whatever tool best tells the story using whatever platform best serves the audience and story.

    Maryn I hear you on the bloggin thing. It seems to be a common problem unfortunately.

    I was a finalist for a internship at a large metro last year and one of the people that interviewed me asked what I’d like to do if I was hired? I responded with a few ideas. One was that I’d like to blog about my experience as an intern in a new city and working in a large newsroom. Her response? Who would want to read that?

  • http://newsvideographer.com/2007/11/15/who-is-getting-it/ Who is “getting it” | News Videographer

    [...] Howard Owens wrote about the difference between “mid-career” and cub journalists in response to Maryn McKenna’s article about mid-career journalists leaving journalism: The people I affectionately call the “gray hairs” (I have a few myself), are eager for new challenges and are excited by what they’re learning online…The cub reporters, not so much. The kids right out of college, they’re the ones most likely to cling to a romanticism about being the crusading print reporter. [...]