Skeptical

Convergence sounds great. Fewer people doing more in a more efficient manner. It’s preserving journalism. The future is now. Right?

What happens when the already high stress occupation as a journalist gets that much more stressful? Is this how print media is supposed to stick around? I understand the fact that more people are becoming more and more media literate, but what is the breaking point for the capacity of an individual?

If this convergence continues to make these offices smaller and smaller, who the hell is going to want to work for a media outlet? Journalists have a pretty high stress threshold, but I could only imagine there comes a point when one would say enough is enough.

I don’t recall reading about any pay increases. Perhaps that’s not the issue at had here, but I feel it’s a significant driving force if this convergence is going to succeed in the long run. A journalist that was paid to write his or her beat is now in charge of three different facets of the paper is not going to want to juggle the additional responsibilities for the same compensation.

Print may not be snuffed out yet, nor has online papers completely taken over. The line may not be as fine as I think it is, and maybe media is transforming better than I think it is. Moving on.

Carole Leigh Hutton of the Mercury News said “What is our place in the market? What is our niche?”

She is talking about a newspaper with a circulation of 230,000! What is our niche? Are you kidding me? Are the advancements in technology really making newspapers of this size resorting to becoming a niche paper? Of course the San Jose area isn’t exactly small, but are audiences so fragmented now on various media platforms that a 230,000 circulation paper is considered that “small?”

—————–

Blogging is new to me. I haven’t read a lot, but had formed a fairly ignorant bias against blogs. I sort of saw them as glorified editorial pages dedicated to self-fulfilling prophecies. The Huang story put me a little more on the fence about blogs and using the web for practical community distribution of information.

The diversification and distribution of information that was able to spread in the Dallas area was rather interesting to me. I like that idea of better serving a community through this sort of thing, but that brought me back to the first article. These types of services that are being provided elsewhere are what I feel should be satisfied through newspaper media. Maybe I just need to get the “net” and stop being so ignorant/oblivious to what’s going on around me.