Outside of tech circles, online journalists are often looked upon as second-tier hacks, peculiar and idiosyncratic, or, as one experienced TV guy recently told me, “a bit strange”. Certainly, even in my supposedly tech-savvy journalism class in Ontario, Canada, many students scoffed at the online aspects of the course. I’m not sure why. Many journalists want their names on glossy spreads or on the front pages of daily newspapers and could care less about whether or not their stories get a ’second run’ on the internet. Not me.
I want to be an online journalist, and it doesn’t bother me if my stories never appear in print. At the moment, I’m in a weird reversal of that situation — I work for a magazine that covers the digital space but has no online presence. Try explaining that people from the tech industry — I do almost every day and a lot of people at first think I’m joking. (For the record, our site is getting built; it has just been slow in arriving.)
From a journalist’s perspective, the benefits of publishing online are manifold. For a start, you have a potentially global readership. Even if you’re writing for a relatively niche site such as, say, Asia Sentinel, there’s always a chance that a news aggregator such as Digg, Fark, or Google News will drive traffic to your story, or that it will benefit from a viral effect, being shared on blogs, social networks, and by email. A good scoop or a great investigative piece — provided it’s not behind a pay-wall — could have a readership in the millions, within hours.
The readership could also build to millions over years. The internet provides a platform to permanently archive your stories in the most incredibly easy-to-access way possible (by search). Again, even if you’re writing for a niche title, your stories will be part of the instantly-accessible body of knowledge right there alongside the New York Times for future readers and researchers to stumble upon.
There are, of course, many other benefits to online journalism, not the least of which is the interactivity inherent in online media, but I won’t bore you with a list. These reasons alone, however, are enough to convince me that if you don’t have online skills — some knowledge of content management, how to link, how to write for the web, how to make podcasts and, maybe, even write to pictures for online video — then there aren’t going to many journalism jobs available for you in five years’ time.
People who ‘don’t get’ online media often point to the gap between the ‘virtual world’ and the ‘physical world’, usually expressing a preference for being able to feel a product in their hands. I admit this is a charming quality of traditional media — I take special pleasure in disappearing into the bathroom with a copy of the New Yorker. But online reading habits and ever-evolving technology are fast closing that gap.
Two recently announced innovations are particularly exciting.
The Smartpen for a start could change the way we approach digital media. This Montblanc-size pen is actually a computer with ink. When you use it to write on special paper — ordinary paper printed with microdots — your scribblings are digitised and sound is recorded. The text and pictures can then be uploaded to your computer, or sent over the internet. Meanwhile, the noise going on while you’re writing is stored in the computer. When you use the pen to tap on a word or picture that you’ve just scribbled, it plays the audio recorded around the time that text or image was created.
Yeah, pretty damn cool. It’s technology that could streamline a journalist’s or a student’s work and open new possibilities for online publishing, including the ability to effectively and quickly present information straight-from-the-hand, which can then be linked to audio.
The pen, to go to market in the fourth quarter, is projected to cost less than US$200, and the paper will be comparable in price to regular paper. You can read more about the mobile computing platform here but I suggest clicking on that first link to see the demo video.
Another technology that got my quill quivering today is Microsoft’s Photosynth, “a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces”, according the bio of its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas. He’s also the mega-mind behind Seadragon, an in-development application that will allow readers to zoom in on images and text of any size in perfect resolution, and smoothly, regardless of bandwidth or amount of data. Seadragon does an infinitely better job at presenting an online replica of the newspaper-reading experience than any e-magazine or online reader out there today.
That all sounds very complicated, so see Blaise’s demo video to get a grasp of what it’s all about — and prepare to be gobsmacked in the process.
So, you see, with all the exciting movement in the digital space, rapidly increasing ad spend on digital platforms, and an online newspaper readership that is growing faster than general internet audience, I’m quite happy to let other journalists look at the .com guys as “a bit strange”. In the meantime, I’m going to keep honing my online skills to make sure I can thrive as a journalist in the future.
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