woodwing

In a recent New York Times piece looking back after 10 years on fabled launch party for Talk Magazine, David Carr mentions in passing that in those 1999 boom times star magazine writers were being paid $5 per word.* At that rate, one of those stars could toss off a thousand words in the morning and make $5,000 before trotting off to lunch at the Four Seasons. No wonder the top journalists are mourning the passing of an era!

Carr's piece got me to thinking about how journalists will thrive in the ex-post world. Sure, there will be a few celebrities who will be paid well for babbling. But I suspect that a new type of professional will emerge, and the key to success may well be an understanding of technology that is equally as sophisticated as an understanding of current events and the ability to write to entertain.

Obviously David Pogue and more subtly James Fallows are examples of what I have in mind. Check out their profiles on Wikipedia. In both cases technology is a focus of their work. But my point is really that they use their understanding of technology to maximize their opportunities as writers and commentators and to navigate the turbulent waters of abrupt structural change in the industry. I suspect that the examples of Pogue and Fallows, not to mention the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, are not lost on the deans of journalism schools in the USA and elsewhere, and that journalism curriculum is in a state of technology ferment.

On a recent visit to Chile, I learned that the journalism students at the Pontifical University almost have to minor in Adobe Creative Suite. It is probably no accident that the new Dean of the UC Berkeley Journalism School was selected shortly after publishing a book "examining the problems of the news industry's adjustment to the digital age". ** Furthermore, while newspapers and magazines are shedding conventional writers by the dozen, corporations and governments are hiring "tech writers" by the score. Who knows?, maybe writing SQL queries will take its place beside writing graceful paragraphs as a qualification for success in this new age. * http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/business/media/03carr.html ** Neil Henry, American Carnival, Journalism under Siege in an Age of New Media.