Hybrids are the Future (of Journalism)

I am now wrapping up my first semester of J-school, and I keep hearing about how all the layoffs at newspapers are actually good for hungry young new journalists.  Hungry young journalists like me, that’s the implication.   Although I’m not so new, and not really quite so young.  Hungry, yes, but that’s just cause I love food.

It occurred to me the other day that the hungry young journos of which they speak are basically like the sweatshop workers of the media industry.   They’re cheap.  They’re nimble.  They’re non-union.  They’re easily and frequently outsourced and subcontracted.  Being young, they’re less likely to get pregnant and demand crazy things like maternity leave.  They’re the low-cost replacement for what used to be respectable middle class union jobs available to people without a college degree.  Sound familiar, Detroit?

Actually, the solution being proposed for the changing newspaper industry is the same as the solution to the changing auto industry: hybrids.

So many professors and industry-watchers say that the only jobs left in journalism are for hybrid journalists, who can write for print, write for the web, produce audio, shoot video, and post it all themselves on a brilliantly designed web page.  For the one person who gets those five or seven jobs, it might be a sweet deal.  For the people who get laid off, not so much.

And for the readers?  I’d venture to say that one person doing all those things, on deadline, might not do them as well as someone trying to do just one.  Multimedia elements can definitely add a lot to a story, and some people and outlets do hybrid journalism really well.  But this is a time when so many issues demand sustained and focused in-depth reporting – the financial crisis, the crisis in veterans’ care, the continued crisis in the Gulf Coast, to name just a few.  I worry that both readers and editors will confuse deep coverage with shallow stories told from many angles.

Choices, choices

The American government has been spending a lot of money lately.  The Federal Reserve backed a $29 billion guarantee to help J.P, Morgan Chase buy Bear Steans.  Then the Fed took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, pledging up to $100 billion per agency.  Most recently, the Fed loaned a cool $85 billion to A.I.G., apparently so it doesn’t go under.

Now news comes from East Africa, via the United Nations, saying that nations in the horn of Africa need $700 million to make sure that 17 million people don’t starve to death, according to the BBC.

Note that that is million, not billion.  East Africa needs $700 MILLION.

Just to put into perspective the enormous difference between a million and a billion:

• a million seconds is one week, four days, and change.
• a billion seconds is 31 years, 251 days, and change.

So, million and billion sound alike, but are actually, well, an order of magnitude different.

I know we need to invest some money to save the economy.  But maybe just a smidgen to save 17 million people would be a good idea too.  I’m just saying.

DC Field Notes, Day 2

I thought I was good at geometry, and at walking, so it didn’t occur to me that I would have trouble navigating the circles that are littered across DC.  However, the crosswalk lights seem designed to stymie human movement.  To go across a circle, like, for example, Dupont Circle, which I seem to need to cross five times a day, you have to cross two rings of traffic on each side, and each ring operates on its own traffic light.  So, you cross the outer ring, wait on an island for a while, then cross the inner ring, walk through the circle, and repeat on the other side.  It’s like concentric frogger.  As Brian Lehrer of WNYC Radio fame (fame?) says, Please Explain?

The Power of the Image: Sean Bell

I was reading an article about Sean Bell the other day, on the CBS 2 News website. Accompanying the story was this image:

It’s a pretty ambiguous image. The text says “Police Shooting” at the top, not specifying whether Sean Bell shot the police or was shot by them. He looks sort of grim – not smiling, alone, almost like a mug shot. And did you notice that the right side of his head looks a little weird? Flat, maybe?

Yeah, that’s because that’s where someone at CBS edited out his wife. That shot of Sean Bell is actually taken from this image:

That’s Sean Bell, his wife Nicole Paultre-Bell, and one of their daughters. Presents quite a different, well, picture than the top image, doesn’t it? A family man, with his beaming fiancee and chuckling little girl.

Flicking through the channels, if you saw the words “Police Shooting” over the shot of the somber, unsmiling Sean Bell, you might assume that he shot a cop, and keep on clicking to something more entertaining. If you saw the words “Police Shooting” over the shot of him with his family, you (a) would not ever think he did the shooting, and (b) you would be sad. You would think oh, what a shame, that nice family man was killed by police. Just remember that when you’re watching the news. They could have used this picture instead.

At the rally and march for Sean Bell today, I saw filmmaker Byron Hurt, who made the great documentary Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which aired earlier this year on PBS. I asked him why he was there, and he said that as a Black man, he feels like it could be him next. And he talked about the fact that the media paints Black and Latino men as violent and as criminals, and that these representations puts fear into the head of the police. Fear that leads them to see guns where there are none, and to shoot unarmed men.

I teach media literacy, so I think about the power of images a lot. But seeing the doctoring of Sean Bell’s image, and talking to Byron Hurt, I was reminded that portraying Black and Latino men as criminals, as threats, isn’t just wrong. It’s lethal.