KUSA's backpack journalists signal shift in TV news
By Dick Kreck
Denver Post Staff Columnist
2/21/06
Dear Boss:
Please don't read this. It could give you ideas.
Backpack journalists, also known as solo journalists or "sojos," are creeping into the television-news business.
KUSA-Channel 9 this week hired Heidi McGuire as a general-assignment reporter/photographer, putting two jobs in one body and, of course, eliminating a second job.
Patti Dennis, news director for 9News, says the trend, which began in the mid-1990s, is more of a step back. "It's actually coming full circle. Many of us started out that way."
In Dennis' scheme of things, combining a reporter's job and a photographer's job enabled her to hire a weather producer. "I had two openings. I'm adding to the staff without adding employees."
Not everyone is so enamored. 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."
Technology, bringing print, electronic and online together, is driving the change, responds Jane Stevens, who teaches journalism at the University of California. "In a few years, backpack journalists ... will not only be the rule, they'll rule."
The bottom line other than the bottom line, says Dennis, is versatility. "The business is changing where you have to develop more than one skill." Dennis thinks McGuire is up to the task. "It has to be the right person. She's a good storyteller, a dynamic personality."
Backpack Journalism
March 7, 2006
Randy Covington is director of the Ifra Newsplex Training Center, a newsroom of the future and professional training facility at the University of South Carolina.
At the Ifra Newsplex at the University of South Carolina, the concept of backpack journalism always stirs up a spirited debate. To some, the idea of one person who both reports and shoots conjures up their worst fears about the future of our profession, confirming suspicions that convergence really is about saving money by getting employees to do more work at the expense of journalistic quality.
While the argument, of course, does have a certain logic, I think it greatly oversimplifies the issue and is not necessarily true. The newsroom of the future is going to be a very different place from the newsroom we know today. It has to be.
News consumers no longer make appointments to watch our news at 6 p.m. or read our newspapers with their morning coffee. Instead, they are following stories throughout the day, catching bits and pieces from a variety of sources.
To meet the needs of this fragmented audience, news organizations inevitably will need to change the way they operate, reorganizing their newsrooms to more effectively produce content across delivery platforms.
I think you can expect newsrooms to become more collaborative as journalists work in story teams. And in the field, the task of capturing images will be shared with reporters and even your audience.
In the debate over backpack journalism, one of the common assumptions is that the quality of the work will suffer. However, from our experience in Newsplex, backpack journalists tend to be pretty good at both reporting and photography….
CONTINUED… Here
Scott Moore is the head of news and information for Yahoo! Media Group, where he oversees Yahoo! News. He was previously the president of MSNBC.com and publisher of Slate. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted for Frontline’s “News War,” on Oct. 26, 2006.
[Newspapers and other news organizations gather an estimated 80 percent of the news every day.] But the Internet has been cutting into the profitability of the economic model that supported that all this time. So who's going to pay for it?
I would take a slight issue with your statement about the newsgathering, because the reality is that the Associated Press and Reuters and other wire services actually probably do the bulk of the newsgathering for newspapers.
A local newspaper that runs national stories, international stories, the sports section -- excluding the local team coverage -- all of that is supplied by these news wire organizations. And in the case of the Associated Press, they're actually owned by the newspapers. Yahoo! News and all the other online news providers have significant partnerships with those wire services. We pay them large, several-million-dollars-a-year licensing fees, so we're actually directly paying for their newsgathering infrastructure.
If you're the Associated Press and you have a business opportunity like licensing content you're producing for newspapers and other traditional forms to a new form like the Internet, and [you] make tens of millions of dollars more a year in doing that, you're going to be motivated to do that. And that's exactly what's happening.
But the Associated Press gets to use the content that its members provide as well.
Right.
Which then you get to use. They may repurpose it in some fashion, but --
Well, the Associated Press does its own newsgathering with its own staff of writers and reporters and editors. I believe that that is the largest newsgathering operation in the United States. We'd have to check that, but I'm pretty sure it is. It's larger than any single newspaper. Then the local papers do their own newsgathering within their markets, and they do feed that content into the AP. But the AP doesn't license all that back out to online providers. They haven't done that. So they typically license the stuff, the material, the news that they're gathering and creating themselves.
So what you're paying for is the newsgathering done by the AP's own employees, not all their members?
Right. That's correct, yeah. Now, the members do supply content into it, and that kind of goes in the mix, so there's some of that. But, for example, we do not have a license at Yahoo! to content that's specifically created by the L.A. Times in Los Angeles on that market unless they choose to put it into that feed.
OK. But still, the numbers involved -- whether it's Yahoo! News or MSNBC.com and so on -- are relatively small compared to the size of the newsgathering organizations and their payroll. So in the future you may be able to help pay for newsgathering. What happens in the interim?
CONTINUED… Here
It's Not TV, It's Yahoo
By SAUL HANSELL
The New York Times
September 24, 2005
As Discovery orbited the Earth in early August, millions of people visited Yahoo, which runs the most popular news site on the Internet, to see the nail-biting conclusion to the troubled shuttle mission. Could NASA find a way to bring the astronauts home safely?
Despite the drama and the huge number of people flocking to the site, Lloyd Braun, the television impresario hired last year to oversee Yahoo's media operation, was not satisfied. All Yahoo was offering its users, Mr. Braun fumed, was a white page filled with links to other sites on the Web.
He made his frustration clear to Scott Moore, who had defected from Microsoft to run Yahoo's news operation. Within a few hours, Mr. Moore orchestrated a quick fix to make the shuttle page comply with Mr. Braun's mantras: "more immersive," "more engaging," and most of all, more original programming.
Mr. Braun's handiwork is just starting to be seen at Yahoo. And as he increasingly puts his stamp on the company, the rest of the media - both old and new - are watching carefully, if not nervously.
As chairman of ABC's entertainment group, Mr. Braun had a penchant for big offbeat concepts like "Lost," which won the Emmy for best drama. At Yahoo, why not create programs in genres that have worked on TV but not really on the Web? Sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, even a short daily humorous take on the news much like Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" are in the works.
There will be elaborate attention-grabbing events and video-heavy programs in nearly every category of content Yahoo offers, from sports to health. The first is called "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone," an audio-video-photo-blog-chat room, run by Mr. Sites, an experienced foreign correspondent, who plans to visit multiple war zones over the next year.
All this Hollywood frenzy still skirts a question: Is Terry S. Semel, Yahoo's chief executive and the former co-head of Warner Brothers, trying to turn Yahoo into the interactive studio of the future?
CONTINUED… Here
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