I met two-dozen "convergent journalists" the other day at USC. They are the children of the media's current crises, and their lot, their jobs, their future, should be of concern to anyone who believes media matters.
Don't get me wrong - I only have the highest admiration for the young, convergent journalists I met from USC's specialized master's program. And, no, they are not part of a paranormal cabal that gathers at the Tommy Trojan statue and howl madly at the harvest moon. Simply put, they are madly multi-tasking reporters, weaving together all of the new, converging threads of social media and news-talk into a bigger, more luxurious, more amorphous, journalism of the future. It could be all for the good....but still I'm concerned - concerned that today's young journalists are being forced by the cruel economics of our floundering, panicky profession to do too much communicating and not enough reporting, too much selling and not enough digging.
Not only must convergent journalists do stories but also they must produce them for multiple formats: as a video (which they shoot, edit, track and perform in) that goes on YouTube or Vimeo; as a microblog on Twitter; as a screed on Facebook. They must be adept at uploads, hyperlinks, downloads - indeed, s7$!*loads of stuff (and when I half-mastered a teletype in the Imperial Valley bureau of the San Diego Union I thought I was pretty tech-savvy!). With all this, where's the time to figure out what's happening at City Hall? To poke through - and go beyond - all the flotsam and press releases to find stories that raise hell, take names and kick out the jambs? I mentioned this concern to one of the young journalists afterward, Leslie Velez. "Seems to me you're being asked to be a jack-of-all-trades," I groaned. And she brightly chimed in: "And the master of none." So they get it. they know the pitfalls. Maybe that's half the battle won already. I hope so.
And then there's the alone-ness of these new journalists. Many of the USC students I met don't see themselves working in a newsroom (a hotbed of ideas where all the cross-pollinating and jiggling around in an enclosed, tense high-caffeine environment produces jokes, mutants and miracles and reinforces journalism values) or having a regular editor (who challenge and inspire their reporters even as they fret about syntax and lawsuits). Freelancers, that's what we would've called these "convergers" in the days of journalism 1.0. USC journalism program directors Michael Parks and Sasha Anawalt (my gracious hosts) say many of their students will have to form informal journalism collectives with other solitary journalists to get feedback on their stories, to check their facts, to bounce ideas off one another. But how sustainable, how reliable will these informal networks be?
Another worrisome point: as freelancers, they must be entrepreneurial, learn how to sell their stories, and then flog the hell out them once they're published to make sure their work gets maximum exposure in the media's increasingly atomized marketplace. USC master's degree candidate Veronica Villafane, a former colleague of mine, told me her goal is to find ways to monetize the new journalism forms - like making real money shooting stories posted on YouTube. None of this was a concern to the classic journalist of yore - leave that stuff to the damned bean-counters! Show me the way to City Hall!
But just going to City Hall now and working for a newspaper, radio or TV station that pays your expenses, gives you a steady salary and benefits, provides you with an insightful editor, a computer, a printer, a newsroom full of colleagues, a giant subscription platform to air your stories - it's increasingly no longer a valid dream. Increasingly it's only a hazy memory. The new kids on the block at USC are the future. Will somebody converge me already?