Reporters are complaining that news organizations are burning them out by making them use more and different types of technology to tell their stories, journalists said at a National Press Club Forum this week.
Journalists charge there is little evidence that new technology is bringing in enough revenue to save jobs and support the news business.
“I have been blogging for years,” said Tony Messenger, a state capital bureau correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “I have yet to have a discussion in my newsroom about why we’re blogging and to tie that somehow into the newspaper’s business model.”
Elaine Sciolino, the Paris correspondent for the New York Times, said she has a deadline to post on the Web by noon, produce video for the Web, write a story for the International Herald-Tribune, and still write a story for the next day’s Times.
“You don’t have a choice,” she said. “If you want to be a journalist today, you just have to work harder and more efficiently. You aim for perfection until your deadline, and then you aim for doneness. You just gut it out.”
Sciolino says the real danger for journalism is so many American news organizations are cutting back on foreign correspondents and international coverage. “The decline in American newspapers is a major national security threat,” she said.
Jennifer Reeves, a student at the Missouri School of Journalism who is studying new media, said many news organizations are embracing new technology because it is cool, not because it delivers a better product.
“A lot of newsrooms need to take a breath and see if the markets need it and find a way to use it logically,” she said.
Elizabeth Merrill, who previously worked for the Kansas City Star and now writes for ESPN.com, said ESPN is trying to offer all of the sports news that a major newspaper does. Merrill said that newspapers can offer the kind of in-depth local coverage that national news organizations lack.
“There are going to be newspaper writers with institutional knowledge who are going to give people things that a national entity can’t,” she said. “I would like to think that they can co-exist.”
