Good advice via Danny Sanchez for young multimedia staffers: Don’t be a cut-and-paste expert.
If your job is to repurpose print content online, and that’s all you know, you’re in trouble. Increasingly those jobs will vanish. As news operations become more Web centric, the days of some graveyard shift guy uploading all the content will close (frankly, they should already be gone, but I know they are not). The future is reporters writing directly into a Web-based CMS that can publish straight to the Web (some times without an editor’s prior intervention!) and repurpose the story for print.
Beyond that: have some ambition. You shouldn’t be in the news game if you don’t have ambition. Regardless of your current position, you should be doing more, learning more, and on your own time if necessary, and it probably is necessary.
And just to pound on my new favorite dead horse these days: You should blog. Everybody should blog.
[tags]journalism, career[/tags]
[…] I’m reminded of Lucas Grindley’s post way back in November in which he highlighted the merits of so-called “Web monkey” work — the endless cutlines, blurbs and copy/pasting into a content management system. Howard Owens painted a bleak future for those limited to these tasks. Mindy McAdams called much of it robot work. And I sternly warned against the danger of students “becoming the Cutline Master.” […]