In this morning’s TV Networks Rewrite the Definition of a News Bureau in the New York Times, we learn that ABC News has a class of “digital journalists.” What is a digital journalist? One who writes, shoots, edits, and uploads video without the assistance of a crew.
Why “digital journalist”? (I’m not the only one who seems to find this terminology questionable: The New York Times handles it with quotation marks whenever it is mentioned.) Are traditional crews analog journalists? No. Do these digital journalist’s’ reports get run in traditional news outlets, broadcast and cable TV? Yes. So what’s the deal?
The deal is that ABC News – or perhaps Marcus Wilford, “vice president for international digital” – is thinking about technology, not what you do with it. Why isn’t Marcus “vice president for getting stories wherever and whenever they’re happening without spending tons of money”?
The infatuation with technology qua technology in business is common. At CDNOW, right after the merger with N2K – the company that brought you web sites such as Music Boulevard – the guy from the N2K IT department, whose name is not worth remembering, decided to slow-motion bulldoze the Macs from our desks and replace them with Windows boxes. I tried to explain that different people performing different tasks need different tools but he saw every computer not as a tool but a piece of technology that he was required – entitled, really – to manage. I asked him why he didn’t expand his realm to encompass pens and notepads, given that such things are clearly writing technology, but he was inexplicably uninterested in managing office supplies.
(I need to mention at this point that pre-merger, about two hundred employees were valiantly – and fairly effectively – supported by one and a half people. Post-merger, the head IT droid had a staff of ten, a couple racks of Exchange servers, a custom PC manufacturing facility, and a poor record of making much of anything work well.)
All technology eventually ceases to be be considered technology. It becomes invisible. It becomes a means to an end. One of the goals of good design is to create a compelling feeling of thingness, to create things that have an existence that transcends their elements. Perversely, the higher the pedestal you place technology on, the harder it is to bake technology into everyday existence. (Is there some important difference between my term thingness and Christopher Alexander’s wholeness, previously known as qwan – quality without a name? Probably not.) If you’re walking around thinking about how special something is, you’re probably going to want to manage and control and strategize the life out of it. And you’re not going to want to bake it into things and make it invisible.
CNN calls its one-man bands “all-platform-journalists”, more clueful if hard on the ears. I’d call them nimble journalists. (Extreme Programming weenies may want to call them agile journalists, but only if they submit minimal, stream-of-consciousness reports that are constantly revised. Sounds like cable TV to me.)
