The Backpacker’s Guide

Pack light, move fast, have fun
Notes for the 2007 SPJ National Journalism Conference, Oct. 5, 2007







For years, photographers and correspondents have traveled into the field with laptops for sending back words and photos. Today’s backpacker takes that a step further - a do-it-all journalist posting digital multimedia.

This gives us the chance to use sound, photos and video to help tell the story. But for some it also raises the expectation of doing everything at once, in the same amount of time, with little training or practice.

The convergence movement has its critics. As Dick Kreck of the Denver Post writes:

Multimedia journalism has been the focus of a heated debate at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California.

"I resist the notion of backpack journalists because I believe it is being foisted on us by publishers who don't feel that 20 percent profit is good enough," wrote multimedia consultant Martha Stone in an online debate. "While some multimedia journalists can handle a variety of tasks efficiently and professionally, most will only deliver mediocre journalism."

I don't think that most multimedia journalists will produce mediocre work.

Most reporters will handle daily assignments as they always have. A few will have the time and training to do investigative reporting. And both will benefit from the availability of inexpensive, easy to use multimedia equipment to help tell their stories.

In the meantime, as the equipment and techniques become more widely used it’s critical to educate editors about what’s possible and what’s reasonable.

My presentation is about that dialogue, about discovering for ourselves what we can do and some of the beginning strategies for incorporating multimedia into the stream of coverage from the field.