Tomorrow's News, Tomorrow's Journalists

Still a print journalist at heart

As journalism moves more and more in the direction of multimedia, I find myself torn. It’s not that I don’t like audio or video journalism, or that I’m not at least somewhat capable of producing such multimedia, it’s just that I enjoy traditional print journalism much more, even with what some call a limited capacity for story telling.

So, despite all my work to become a well-rounded multimedia and print journalist, I hope to work mainly as a print reporter in the future, perhaps capturing audio or video to go online for some stories, photos for others.

I enjoy weaving words and creating visual images for the reader’s mind. Whether it’s a story based on a 15-minute conversation or a two-hour-long interview, I try to find that uniqueness that makes a story a story and not just a string of words thrown together. When you move exclusively to audio and video — you lose the ability to shape what your reporting on, to tell a story in your own voice.

At the same time, I don’t believe that injecting a reporter into an audio or video production is an option, as that most times produces laughable results — especially with video (unless they know broadcast journalism well).

Audio and video do, however, have the ability to enhance a print story in its online form. In this day and age, no important event should be covered without the basic idea of putting audio soundslides with the story online. And I hope a future job lends me the ability to accomplish that when necessary.

Photos, in and of themselves, also have the ability to tell a story in a visual fashion that can be just as good, if not better, than print reporting alone. Add in audio or music and you get productions such as MediaStorm which tell stories from multiple angles that print journalism alone could not accomplish.

Overall, I think it’s important not to separate multimedia and print — or to have two distinct reporters for each of those categories. Instead, a more streamlined production could be made by having print reporters combine audio, video or photo slides to stories that lend themselves to that type of multimedia.

The focus, though, I hope will remain on the writing.

(Katharine Lackey is a senior majoring in journalism at Penn State and blogs at Beyond Print: Into the Prism)