I asked the room during my presentation yesterday who their writing heroes were. One student journalist (Michael Davenport from Waterloo) mentioned Cory Doctorow. Doctorow is the originator of a hugely popular culture blog (for lack of a better term) called BoingBoing. Marketing guru Seth Godin describe’s Doctorow’s work style thusly:

I sat next to Cory at a conference today. It was like playing basketball next to Michael Jordan. Cory was looking at more than 30 screens a minute. He was bouncing from his mail to his calendar to a travel site and then back. His fingers were a blur as he processed inbound mail, visiting more than a dozen sites in the amount of time it took for my neck to cramp up. I’m very fast, but Cory is in a different league entirely. Rereading this, I can see I’m not doing it justice. I wish I had a video…

This was never a skill before. I mean, maybe if you were an air traffic controller, but for most of us, most of the time, this data overload skill and the ability to make snap judgments is not taught or rewarded.

As the world welcomes more real-time editors working hard in low-overhead organizations, I think it’s going to be a skill in very high demand.

Certainly, editors at news organizations have been using a similar skill set for years. But this is editing on steroids.

Making sense of the huge information flow that is the online environment, filtering this out for your specific audience/interests, and then pointing to the work of others is a skill. Like Godin, I think this is going to be an important skill for people - especially journalists - in the coming years.

How so? Let’s say you’re the education reporter for a paper. To provide the necessary amount of depth for your readers, you’re going to need to spend a lot of effort gathering local information about education. But that doesn’t always come from your sources. You’ll also likely have a set of web sites and weblogs that are devoted to education that you can use as idea-generating sources. You will also likely want to have RSS feeds for local blogs from individuals who may have a passing interest in education.

As you gather information about your beat, these sources may not be the most crucial tools in your tool kit, but I’d argue that they are the things that will give you an edge. They may provide that little extra that separates a great reporter from a good reporter. And IMHO, they will make you that much more invaluable to your news organization.

But being adept at this type of reporting takes knowledge of new technology, something that is sometimes looked down upon. I don’t care how many times I have to repeat it on this weblog, but technology is a tool. You can use new media to be a great reporter. Or you can use it as a crutch. I happen to think there are a lot of talented student reporters out there who can become great if they’ll understand and use these tools appropriately.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 9:30 am and is filed under career talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.