Journalism's role.

In The News about the News the 260 person staff at the News & Observer is broken down to help describe just who makes those morning miracles that we call newspapers happen. The biggest chunk of those staff members is clearly the reporting staff (100), followed by the sixteen photographers and eight researchers. At the end of this sampling of journalism jobs are six graphic artists who make up a little over five percent of the workforce at the paper.

It’s not hard to understand why people talk about reporting and reporters so much when they think of newspapers. It’s easy to talk about what the future of journalism will look like in terms of how stories will be told and via what media people will get those stories. What gets overlooked much of the time is how people get to those stories.
In class on Wednesday we spent a lot of time talking about a few distinct types of online media outlets that people gravitate toward. A lot of points were made for each news source, but in the end it seemed like personal preference was a bigger factor than any sort of objective measurement. Reporting is extremely important, and the backbone of any good newspaper, but design is key to getting people back to read the news day to day.

Journalism shouldn’t just be about exposing issues and informing the public. Yes, these things are at the very core of the industry’s role in our democratic society, but if journalists want to compete they’re going to need to do more. Journalism has to compete with a culture more pervaded by high-impact entertainment everyday and people who would just as soon watch infotainment and reality TV programs in order to get their fill of the real world on any given evening.

Journalists need to develop the ability to enthrall readers and not just inform them. It’s good and well to be blown away by high sales numbers on days like Sept. 12, 2001, but journalists have so many technological tools to draw readers in that they should be trying to get people reading about the news everyday.

Downie and Kaiser describe broadcasters as the purveyors of news and print outlets as the ones who dig up the news and describe it in detail. Why do people turn to television stations time and again? TV stations know they cannot compete with newspapers in terms of coverage, depth or detail and in stead have embraced the short form story. Bite-sized news is the name of the game over the airwaves, with lots of bell and whistles to attack the story from multiple angles at once. Photos, video, voiceovers and news tickers all come together to bombard the reader with a plethora of information in a short timeframe.

Newspapers can do this. Short form stories can, and should, run next to the longer explanative pieces. Design and graphics should come together to highlight facts and tell stories in ways that are quickly accessible to readers and can entice them not to just read the longer story, but also to keep coming back to the paper. In order to do this, newsrooms need to continue to become more collaborative. Researchers, photographers, artists, designers and editors need to sit down at the same table and have open conversations throughout the entire process. Reporting shouldn’t just be about reporters. The facts that these journalists uncover shouldn’t be looked at in a vacuum. How do all the parts of a story interact? What can every person at a newspaper do to improve storytelling?

Everyone at a newspaper should be contributing to how each story is told. Reporters should be sharing facts, designers should be making stories accessible, photographers should be showing the news and editors should be examining the facts. The essential role of journalism isn’t going to change tons in a persistent democracy, but journalists will still have to continue to reinvent themselves and figure out how to tell every story from every angle and give every reason something of value.