Why I think the generational nonsense is so much BS
Ryan Sholin, Steve Yelvington, Shannan Bowen and others have been weighing in on the journalism generation gap. Got me to thinking of exceptions.
Tom Warhover, Executive Editor for Innovation (or something like that) at the Missourian. 50ish. Gets it. Wants more multimedia. Wants more data. Wants to provide it in ways that aren’t measured in inches. Gets excited by the new and wants to try it out.
He has the job of teaching the majority of students at the Missouri School of Journalism (and I’m sure are prevalent in other, similar school around the country), who, you know, want to write for a living and can’t see why they need to do all this other stuff. Oh. My. God. To tell you the times I heard these people prater on about their want to write, and travel, and… that’s about the brunt of it. Take photos? Video? Out of the question. The typical reaction to industry layoffs could be summarized as “More jobs for us!” Er, no. Not you, oh clueless one. Can they ever get it? Sure, but being young is by no means the equivalent of being clued in.
Don Wyatt, Executive Editor at the Springfield News-Leader. Gets it in a big way. Instituted online goals for reporters… reporters! Asked me about the feasibility of providing cell phone interfaces to data. Where’d that come from? His subscription to ESPN mobile, of course. (Are we supposed to acknowledge that 50-ish folks have cell phones?) Made sure to work recorders for every reporter into a tight budget, and even instituted some in-house training. Yeah, he’s 50ish, too.
To cast this split as generational is to ignore key truths. It creates a false Us v. Them along age lines that just doesn’t exist.
You can start cooking up ideas no matter your age. You can fail to see their use no matter your youth. There is no easy litmus test, the proof is in the pudding.
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This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Innovation, Internet. 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.
on July 12, 2008 at 2:18 pm Ryan Sholin wrote:
Of course. I’m not making any rules, just floating an idea, a way to make sense out of the hard lines drawn in the sand in Tampa. You can’t spell “generalization” without “generation,” right?
The exceptions are everywhere, especially in J-schools.
on July 13, 2008 at 7:31 am yelvington wrote:
Generalizations are always … just generalizations. There’s crushing statistical evidence of a generational shift from print to digital media, and away from single-source pull to multisource “stumbled upon” information consumption, but you can always find individuals who don’t fit the pattern.
And as you observe, a lot of people who don’t fit the general societal pattern self-select into journalism programs. You may wind up with a bunch of students whose heads are in some ways stuck in the 1920s when mass media, mass production and mass merchandising were ascendant, being taught by fiftysomething professors whose heads are in the decentralized peer-to-peer 21st century.
Much against my will, I’ve become a fiftysomething old fart. It’s better than the alternative. I try to compensate by being a twittering, facebooking, always-on, open-source citizen media old fart.