How we Got here

Journalism’s professional orientation has long united its practitioners and students. Journalism is rare among academic disciplines in that it, in a way perhaps similar to forensics (debate) and sports programs, allows students ample opportunities for real world practice while still enrolled in college. There are few collegiate activities outside of sports that routinely send enthusiastic students to conferences and trade shows. Anyone harboring doubts about the future of journalism need only attend a college journalism conference to have their faith renewed for good.

Journalism has always been more than a job for those who do it. Journalists share a strong culture. Until the 1970s, journalism ran like a medieval guild where young men who started as copy boys rose slowly through the ranks over years to become reporters, editors or copy chiefs. The vast majority of reporters were male and lacked formal education. They learned on the job by immersing themselves in their news beat over decades. This now-obsolete model of the hard-bitten journalist was similar to Raymond Chandleresque gumshoe stereotypes.

Figure 1.2 The Village Voice remains the first and most famous alternative newsweekly. Photo by Bigjoe5216 / Wikimedia Commons.

The image of the hard-drinking, hard-living journalist who made his bones by becoming a political insider with connections across the city began to fade in the mid-1950s, with the advent of the alternative press. The earliest and still best-known alternative newspaper is New York’s Village Voice, a weekly tabloid that covered the counterculture that was beginning to coalesce (at least in large coastal cities) during Eisenhower’s famously conservative postwar 1950s. For the first time in hundreds of years, the alternative press changed the newspaper’s business model by running the kinds of advertisements the mainstream dailies refused to print—mostly for pornography and prostitution (advertised as escort services or massage parlors). Although the Voice initially charged a cover price, it eventually sold enough ads to support the distribution of copies throughout New York City for free. Other alternative weekly newspapers ultimately followed the Voice’s lead and offered free circulation instead of paid subscriptions. Circulation continued to grow as newspaper companies installed honor boxes (which allowed readers to take copies without putting coins in a slot) on city sidewalks alongside the dailies’ coin-operated boxes. As young people started moving back to the cities following the suburban exodus of the middle class in the postwar years, alternative weeklies enjoyed a surge in readership and popularity. By the 1990s alternative weeklies had themselves become the mainstream, largely eschewing the kind of extensive investigative reporting they had become famous for a generation earlier in favor of expanded arts and entertainment coverage, and lifestyle features. Instead of picking up the paper to read about political corruption or pressing social issues, most people browsed alt weeklies for their extensive events calendars, arts reviews, and movie times listings. Although they did not much resemble Voice co-founder Norman Mailer’s vision for alternative journalism, the weeklies were selling ads and doing well through the 1990s. But the alt weekly renaissance would also ultimately end.

For the alternative press, the end began with an early Web browser called Netscape and the funny-sounding search engine Yahoo! Within a few years, Craig-slist, a peer-to-peer online marketplace, went national, and soon those ads for pornography and prostitution that had previously been the exclusive domain of alt weeklies began moving online. In 2000, when Craigslist expanded nationally from its local San Francisco Bay Area home, the ad-supported alternative weekly business model began to falter. It would take several years for alt weeklies to feel the full effect of Craigslist’s classified domination, but eventually, just like their peers at daily newspapers, journalists working at weeklies began expressing legitimate worry about their futures. It was at this time that talk of alternative models not just for reporting news but also for financing it emerged. At first hope came from strange places—namely philanthropists.

Although it would be decades until the converged newsroom would become a reality, way back in 1975 an old-time Florida newspaperman known for his starched white oxford shirts and natty bowties changed the future of journalism in ways he could never have imagined at the time of his death in 1978. Nelson Poynter’s legacy, now known as the Poynter Institute, began its existence as Modern Media Institute, a school for journalists that owned controlling stock in Poynter’s St. Petersburg Times Company, which publishes the Tampa Bay Times. Poynter’s dream was two-fold. Not only did he want to protect his newspaper from marketplace demands, but he wanted to help train working journalists to improve their craft.¹

Poynter’s experiment has endured, enjoying years of success as a training ground for journalists. Today, the Poynter Institute and its extensive website Poynter.org are among the best-known resources in journalism. Every day new and experienced journalists turn to Poynter for onsite and online training, webinars, tutorials, news, tips, and job leads. After years in the spotlight and consistent Pulitzer Prizes, the future may not be so bright for the Tampa Bay Times, which remains one of few news entities owned by a nonprofit organization. Toward the end of 2014, high-profile media blogger (formerly for Poynter.org) Jim Romenesko wrote about the Times’ precarious finances. Quoting from an email he received from an anonymous staffer, Romenesko blogged about a “crisis situation” in which the paper was “on the brink of doom” over financial shortfalls.²

Although the Times’ unusual business model remained a curiosity for the first couple decades after Poynter’s death, it became a topic of serious consideration in the early years of the millennium, when those in the news business started seriously looking at alternative business models to keep print journalism alive. “[B]eleaguered industry veterans longingly turn their collective gaze to the Times and Poynter for inspiration,” Times veteran Louis Hau wrote in Forbes in late 2006.³ At around the time of the Forbes article, desperation over the decline of the traditional for-profit newspaper model led some to cling to the nonprofit model like a lifeboat. But the news industry was about to become much more complicated. Soon it was not just the business model but the platform itself that would undergo unprecedented change.

By 2005 the concept of the “Web-first” newsroom had taken hold in traditional newspaper offices everywhere. The radical new idea—that instead of an online regurgitation of the exact contents of the print edition, a newspaper’s stories would break on the paper’s website, then get the full treatment in print—was not winning over many fans. The paper’s writers and editors remained convinced that print contained the paper’s most exclusive real estate, and that no one would go online to read a story that was also available in print. In this pre-smartphone era with the introduction of Apple’s first iPhone still a couple years off, few used mobile devices to access the Internet, and no one used them to read newspaper stories. But newspaper and magazine publishers were becoming increasingly aware of the need to publish online. The big question was what to publish. Breaking news stories such as trial coverage opened the door to a new kind of reporting, as journalists were for the first time free of rigid deadline pressures and were newly liberated to post content before an editor could read it. This simple alteration in workflow flipped the newsroom power dynamic. Writers and reporters rejoiced while editors wondered how they could maintain quality control (or simply control) in the twenty-four-hour newsroom.

At the Philadelphia Weekly, an alternative weekly newspaper, the move online was straightforward. Like at many newspapers and magazines in the early days of online publication, the exact contents of each issue were simply duplicated online. Then in 2003, when senior writer Steve Volk covered local rapper Beanie Sigel’s murder trial from right outside the courtroom, reporting on the latest revelations via a blog, both the newsroom and Volk’s readers were energized by the speed of coverage. After posting to the blog with his wifi-enabled laptop, Volk would email or call the office. The copy was then printed for interns to fact-check and editors to edit. An editor would then log into the paper’s blog account and make any necessary changes—after the story was published. It was a process that made editors who lived and died by the formal fact-checking process a little crazy. Risking the momentary publication of errors—or worse—did not endear copy editors to the process. Over time the process would get more efficient and easier to manage, but the copy desk has not been the same since.

The “Web-First” Revolution

Back in winter 2006, Michael Riley, editor of the Roanoke Times and a 1995 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, wrote presciently about the Web-first model in the foundation’s journal. Journalism’s future survival, he wrote, would

Among many ideas for reinvigorating the news business Riley wrote about (including using video to supplement the reporting of news stories and developing websites that reach beyond the terrestrial readership), he also made a suggestion that seems quaint (and impossible) in retrospect. Citing Google and Yahoo!, he suggested newspapers take control of local search data before others had a chance to. He instructed journalists to “take a crash course in how to gather up this information, pour it into a database, offer a dynamite search function, and become the best source of local information.”⁵ This was before Yelp was ubiquitous. Twitter had just launched. Although Riley could not have known it at the time, it was, at the time of his writing, already too late for most urban daily newspapers to claim online access to the readers they were losing in their markets. While he had been right about the coming emphasis on hyperlocal and community news, he was wrong in thinking that the staid traditional news outlets that had spent the last decade fighting the online invaders would be the ones to lead the charge toward the new journalism frontier. The news model had changed, and changing seasoned news-room minds to embrace a whole new way of doing things would prove far less efficient than training new journalists in new methods.

An Early Model

One of the first success stories of early Web-first journalism, the investigative news site Voice of San Diego (VOSD) is still going strong, although it looks a little different than it did in the early days when print still ruled and investing in online journalism seemed a risky bet at best. In 2004, San Diego was a large but conservative media market defined by a right-leaning newspaper, the Union-Tribune, owned by the Copleys, a famous local family of developers and contributors to Republican causes.⁶ Soon after San Diego’s only big daily newspaper dismissed columnist and editor Neil Morgan, he and local venture capitalist and entrepreneur Buzz Woolley started plans to launch the all-online news site Voice of San Diego. According to the publication’s “About Us” page, both men thought the city needed more news voices, analysis, and reporting.⁷ Although Morgan and Woolley never discussed it publicly, there was a clear subtext to the claim that the city needed more voices: The right-leaning Union-Tribune, Morgan’s former paper, shouldn’t be the city’s main news source. Woolley anted up the site’s first-year funding—$354,399—out of frustration that the local news media neglected to report on major issues involving the highest levels of local government. One story in particular, the city’s pension scandal, which made national headlines when it broke—no thanks to local media—underscored the many lapses in San Diego’s news coverage at the time.⁸ Woolley’s donation was generous, but it would not last long. Voice of San Diego would quickly have to garner additional funding if it were to remain a going concern.

VOSD’s writers and editors were young. The staff was small. The mission was simple: essentially, to bring investigative journalism to a region that lacked much serious news reporting.⁹ Investigative reporting remains the most expensive kind of journalism, regardless of the medium or the platform. It requires skilled and well-trained journalists who are granted the kind of long deadlines that in-depth reporting requires. For VOSD, this meant that other reporters would have to be hired for daily coverage that investigative reporters would not have time to produce. But with limited competition from other local news outlets and no printing costs, it was clear that if the Voice remained independent and reported on important stories that had been largely ignored by the mainstream press, it could go far. Voice of San Diego would have to enjoy early success if it were to remain financially viable. And it did.

Much of Voice of San Diego’s early success has been credited to current CEO Scott Lewis and former editor Andrew Donohue (now senior editor at the Center for Investigative Reporting), both twentysomethings at the time who were fairly new to journalism. Unlike more seasoned journalists who had years or even decades of traditional newsroom experience to overcome, they were young, eager, and willing to work for less money than the average midcareer union reporter (although established urban dailies had already begun buying out their reporters’ contracts in the previous years, as revenues declined and unions began losing their leverage). A 2008 Christian Science Monitor story posited Voice of San Diego as a model of nonprofit journalism that was spreading across the industry. Noting a number of new entrants into the nonprofit sphere, Monitor reporter Randy Dotinga reminded readers of his own paper’s nonprofit status as well as that of the Poynter Institute’s St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times).¹⁰

There are now several nonprofit news sites in the United States. These include the Texas Tribune, an online local news site established in 2009 and supported by grants from financier T. Boone Pickens and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation among others, and MinnPost, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit news site established in 2007 and supported by the Knight Foundation and several local foundations. The Manhattan-based investigative news site ProPublica was established in 2007 and has received funding from the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Carnegie Corporation among others. ProPublica has won several high-profile awards, including Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting.

What Voice of San Diego pioneered in the earliest years of the twenty-first century hardly seems revolutionary today, but no other news outlets were doing it at the time. Most had hardly even established websites by the time VOSD made a routine of reporting daily news online. In the early years of the site, it offered long (by Internet standards) reports with embedded video and links. It also ran short blog-type postings by regular columnists. Again, not that different from most online news sites today, except these days online stories tend to run shorter. That VOSD offered more original local content was a welcome change for news buffs who had watched the news holes in their local dailies shrink precipitously in recent years. Readership took off, though there were never as many daily hits on VOSD as there were once daily readers of the Union-Tribune. Even in its diminished state, U-T San Diego, as of 2007, was just shy of 300,000.¹¹ It would lose some 50,000 daily readers over the next six years,¹² but while the U-T counted readers in hundreds of thousands, Voice of San Diego continues to log just several thousands of daily hits¹³—a respectable showing for today’s fragmented media environment.

By publishing the kind of investigative journalism that had not been seen in San Diego for years, and publishing it online, where editorial space concerns were not an issue, VOSD won early recognition from a new and growing online news community—specifically, the Online News Association (ONA), which awarded VOSD a first-place Online Journalism Award for “Online Topical Reporting/Blogging, Small Site” in 2010.¹⁴

Voice of San Diego CEO Scott Lewis sat for a brief interview inside the VOSD offices at the San Diego Foundation in Liberty Station, an old Navy training center.

Interview: A Conversation with Scott Lewis, CEO, Voice of San Diego

What did the founders hope to accomplish with Voice of San Diego?

Neil Morgan and Buzz Woolley wanted to come up with something new. They decided they had made enough money in life and wanted to find a way to save the cost of print but also still pay profes sional journalists. That’s where they came up with the nonprofit online model. They just wanted to create something that people liked and that did investigative news in San Diego around important topics like quality of life, the economy, quality schools, government efficiency, all that.

Figure 1.3 Scott Lewis.

You were among the first news outlets to use an unusual funding model.

There had been nonprofit journalism before. Obviously there was public radio. And there had been online journalism before, like Salon and Slate. But nobody had combined the two. We were the first to do that. We’ve had dozens of news organizations write stories about us, but often they get it wrong because they assume we were in response to the decline of the news industry and the problems of local journalism. But remember that was 2004, and in 2004 things were doing quite well in the newspaper business. People were selling newspaper companies for a lot of money, and revenues did not seem to be that worrisome. With the credit bust and other crises in the financial markets, that changed that. That we were in response to a local challenge and not a national one was why we came up with the model that we did, and why it ended up becoming a model for the country.

Describe the model and how it works.

It’s not a new model. Public radio has been using a similar system for decades. But the difference is we don’t have any of the high costs of transmission, antennas, control rooms, that sort of thing. One of the sites that followed our lead was the Texas Tribune. They followed our lead, but now they’re so big and important, we actually learn a lot from them. The founder of that organization calls it revenue promiscuity where they just try to get as many types of revenue and as many sources within those types as possible to create a sustainable organization.

What would someone need to create a similar organization somewhere else?

It’s not unlike too many other kinds of business. Every engine needs a spark, so there needs to be a capacity investment of some kind. Building it out of nothing would be difficult. But there are some who have built pretty cool things out of nothing. Texas really set the standard for investing at the beginning in quality leadership and corporate sponsorship directors and in a nice website that really set the standard for how an operation like this should be started. One thing to keep in mind is we’re not talking about a lot of money. Texas Tribune is now held up as this giant model, but its budget this year is at $6 million. Compared to other cultural institutions, that’s really not that much money.

What advice do you have for someone looking to create a news site like Voice of San Diego?

Make as much of an investment in the business model as they make in the editorial design. There are a lot of former journalists who just want to do editorial work, and that’s fine, but they need to make investments in sustainability to be able to keep doing it.

I was just a writer and an editor, and I evolved into somebody who was getting grants and recruiting donors, and then we went through some crises here and there, and emerged from that with the determination that we needed some more support. I recruited our VP, Mary Walter-Brown, who has added a lot of sophistication and professionalism to the business side. Throughout the whole process, we’ve had to learn to be entrepreneurial, to create events and products that people like and at the same time make sure we haven’t drifted from that mission to explain and investigate the news.

How have changes in local news affected what you do?

We were always a response to the local news climate. We were always a creation of it. Frustration about there being only one newspaper in town was at the heart of our origination. That’s not necessarily a knock against them. No one institution can do the job of filling a community’s information needs completely. So there needs to be pressures. There needs to be rivalries. There’s plenty of room for more sources of information. Some changes at the U-T highlighted the need for an alternative source of information. Particularly, of course, when Doug Manchester purchased the U-T, there was a lot of concern on the left and right. People wanted to make sure there were strong alternatives. So we benefit from time to time from worries about the U-T. But we want the U-T to be a strong and thriving institution. It doesn’t do our community any good if they fall apart and die. Any criticisms we have of them are in the vein of wanting them to be stronger and better. We don’t see anyone in town as a competitor. As a nonprofit, we see every outlet in town as a potential partner. We learn from other people trying. There are editorial rivalries among our staffs, but our model doesn’t put us into competition with any other organization.

Have you partnered with other news organizations to expand your reach or leverage your strengths?

We have several thriving partnerships. Our biggest one is with NBC. We work in tandem with them on several projects, but also two segments a week that themselves have gotten national news coverage. We have a partnership with [local public radio station] KPBS. We share a reporter. We pay one-third of her costs, and they pay the rest. We have a partnership with [local AM radio station] KOGO. We do a radio show each week with them and a podcast. And we have a partnership with San Diego magazine. We think partnerships are key because our website is really just one tool that we have in our quiver to reach people, and as long as we reach them we don’t really care that it has to be through our website. So social media, for example, doesn’t have to be a way to get people to our website. It can be a way to just get the work done itself, as long as people recognize it’s from this service. A lot of us, from TV stations to radio stations and others, recognize that there’s no need for many of us to fight because we don’t have competing business models. So we might as well supplement each other’s work, and we can all thrive.

What does Voice of San Diego deliver that others don’t?

Our staff is mandated to only pursue stories that, (a) no one else is doing, or (b) that we think we can do better. So our entire approach to news, our entire approach to investigations, is about maximizing our impact and reducing the possibility that we will be redundant. That means, by definition, we will always add value to the news ecosystem. Our mission is two-part. It’s one part to do investigative work that uncovers realities or inefficiencies or corruption or malfeasance or complexity that needs to be cleared up, and the second part is to explain the news in a way that’s conversational and approachable so that people can follow major issues really well. We believe there’s been a lack of explaining going on in news, and we think we’ve done a good job of approaching that so that budgets and elections are understandable.

How can students prepare for the future of journalism?

I think the future of journalism has to do with skills and deep occupational information. For example, I think there are going to be huge opportunities for people who understand accounting, who understand science and engineering, and who understand more technical subjects, and are able to write about them. I think that our industry will covet them as we get more and more involved in data, in particular computer science and statistics, and math and forensic accounting, and things like that. Those professions pay more than journalism does, but over time I think we will learn the value of those skills. I urge younger students to make sure they’re good at math, make sure they understand concepts like that.

How can professional journalists distinguish themselves from casual bloggers?

I use that as a motivating factor for the staff. I say, “Look. Anybody can write these days, so you have to prove to the community that you’re worth paying for it.” It’s become clear to me that finding people who are actually talented at it and who can really generate enthusiasm and sharing and engagement about what they’ve written are few and far between. They need to remember they’re on top of a pyramid of people who would love to do this for a living, so they need to show why they’re the ones to trust with it.

Where did you go to school and what did you study?

I went to the University of Utah, and I studied history and Spanish, but I worked at the school paper, the University of Utah’s Daily Chronicle. It was at that paper that I got all my journalism training. I never thought I would stick with journalism, but I just kept doing it, and it worked out.

What advice do you have for independent journalists these days?

I would focus on a particular niche. Anyone who tries to be a mile wide and an inch deep is just not going to get attention these days. But somebody who’s a mile deep on one particular topic can really own it. So if you just focused on the impact of climate change on San Diego, or if you wrote about one particular kind of science happening in San Diego or surfing or something in particular that you own, you would very quickly rise to the top of that if you did it well.

What advice do you have for journalists just starting out?

The key for a lot of journalists starting out is to freelance and to pitch editors relentlessly. Even if they don’t pay well, once you start to gain a presence in the discussion marketplace, it’s a lot easier at that point.

What skill sets do today’s journalists need?

There’s a lot of emphasis on being able to code and do computer programming, and I think that is valuable. More important is to have a healthy respect for what can be done, and then to have the personality skills to be able to pull things off, to be resourceful, to be open to partnerships, and I think a lot of that has to do with being able to articulate your vision, to be able to speak well in public. Again, I think there’s going to be a real high value on people who understand math and science and accounting. Another area that’s important is graphic design and information visualization. If you’re a good reporter and you can also design graphics and images that go into your posts, you will be really well appreciated. We have to respect the sciences and math. It’s kind of embarrassing that [journalists] didn’t for so long.

How do you keep up with changing technology and prepare for what’s to come?

I try to consume all of the new gadgets. The Nieman Lab is an invaluable source of information for me. Twitter has proven to be a great mechanism for finding out what’s going on in our world. Journalists are well represented on Twitter, so following the latest trends and crises and ideas from that is pretty easy. Voice has never had a major investment budget for our technology platform, so this year we hope to do more than we’ve ever done before to professionalize it and get it up to speed.

What’s next for Voice of San Diego ?

Our goal is to figure out just how big an institution like this should be in a town like this. We’re going to try to expand, but also do it strategically and in a sustainable way, and figure out where our limits are.

Not a Universal Model for Journalism

Despite a growing reputation for delivering high-quality news using a nonprofit business model, Voice of San Diego’s formula could not be easily translated to other news outlets. While Voice of San Diego remained a shining bright spot in an industry beset by bad news and declines in recent years, when some grant funding it had relied on for operations expired two reporters and a photographer were laid off in 2011.¹⁵ Although the site would survive and continue to do good work, Voice of San Diego’s financial struggles came as sobering news to an industry increasingly pinning its hopes on the nonprofit model. In early 2012, VOSD launched another experiment in journalism funding by creating a membership program along the lines of those run by public radio and television stations. But also like most supporters of public broadcasting, Voice of San Diego’s paying members skew toward the older and wealthier,¹⁶ who are more willing to pay for news. Despite several news outlets’ experiments with paywalls, few younger and less affluent Americans think paying for news makes sense when you can scan the Web for free on a smartphone. So while Voice of San Diego has improved the quality and diversity of news coverage in San Diego, it has done little to permanently alter journalism’s business model. That means, for now at least, unless every city in America that needs more robust news coverage can find a well-heeled benefactor to fund the local news, the nonprofit model remains just one vision for journalism’s future.

On the editorial side, Voice of San Diego did help transform the way news is reported by proving to its early critics that a news outlet could keep up with—or, as is increasingly the case, outpace—the mainstream outlets that had dominated local news for decades. Most important, Voice of San Diego rendered the Web-first concept that traditional newsrooms were just learning about a rather quaint notion. Instead of convincing reporters that publishing their stories online was just as important as publishing them on newsprint, VOSD proved that important news stories did not need to be in print at all. Online publication was faster, less expensive to produce, and easier to update, augment or change. While few these days question the merits of online publication, in the first years of the twenty-first century, print news still ruled. Much has changed since 2005. The versatility and depth of reporting possible online has in many ways revolutionized the industry.

A Special Case

San Diego is a crucible of media transformation. In many ways it is a unique market. Not only is it home to the pioneering Voice of San Diego, but the current owner of its storied daily newspaper, a local developer and hotelier, freely admits his desire to use the paper to promote development and advance his own interests in the city. When “Papa Doug” Manchester spoke to local media about his reasons for buying the U-T in 2011, the local media (many of whom were on Manchester’s payroll) were notoriously quiet about the unprecedented development. By late 2012, private equity groups had gobbled up many of the region’s daily newspapers. Besides, a pro-business bias was nothing new for the Union-Tribune. But not since the early days of Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s empires had newspaper owners exercised such direct control of the editorial process. Since Manchester took over in late 2011, the U-T has run front-page editorials and special sections to promote Manchester’s business associates. Bloggers and journalists made apt comparisons to Citizen Kane. Andrew Donohue, then the editor of Voice of San Diego, told American Journalism Review, “The scary part of it is, the price of buying a newspaper has gotten so cheap … you could just buy a newspaper and emerge as a player.”¹⁷

Manchester was already well known in San Diego, as was the future of print journalism. However, the unique demographics of the paper’s readership (an older readership that has largely prevented the degree of steep circulation declines experienced by other big city dailies) perhaps led U-T management to stumble in its first forays into convergence. Its news website, SignOn-SanDiego.com, debuted in the first years of the new millennium, and featured mostly online versions of stories from the print edition. In the early years, there was limited evidence of convergence. Then in 2012, years after the debut of convergent journalism, the recently renamed U-T San Diego launched its own experiment in convergence by creating its own cable TV news station, like a local CNN. Few were able to tune in since Manchester could not secure a carriage agreement with Time Warner Cable, and Cox, the other local cable company, offered the channel only to its digital subscribers.¹⁸ The channel was hard to find, and the programming was notoriously dated, reminding some of another infamous San Diego TV news broadcast brought to life by Will Ferrell and his sexist 70s anchorman Ron Burgundy. A scathing Voice of San Diego review from early 2013 cited an episode in which a U-T TV interviewer asked San Diego’s female district attorney whether she wore a thong and another in which a male host taunted his female co-host with unwelcome sexual comments while introducing a segment about a food truck called Mastiff Sausage Company.¹⁹ In February 2014, U-T San Diego announced it would no longer broadcast on cable, and that it would lay off some of the station’s forty-five employees so that the news outlet could focus instead on bolstering its online offerings.

Summary

Beginning in the 1990s, widespread Internet access made convergent journalism possible for the first time by allowing the Web to serve as a new platform for the flexible dissemination of news and information. Convergence has since matured. Indeed, most news has been converged for years. Most print and broadcast have websites and blogs. Many routinely post photos, videos, and slideshows. Some boast podcasts. Others host live online events. Most are active on social media. Some even curate social media content, occasionally covering breaking stories half a world away.

As the success of the converged newsroom has shown, journalism is not dying. It is simply in a state of flux. With more ways of getting news these days and much greater access to the distribution tools, there is more demand for journalism than ever. But the journalist’s job has changed. For most who hope to make a career of journalism, it is no longer sufficient to simply write solid stories or take good photos. In the converged newsroom, journalists need to do everything. While most will specialize, depending on what skill set or personality trait drew them to the field to begin with, now writers need to know how to take a decent photo, shoot and edit a short video, post their work online, and use social media to draw audiences to their stories.

Journalist’s Toolkit

Most news organizations today deliver a multimedia product and require their journalists to possess a wide skill set. They may require their reporters to use specific tools or may ask them to choose their tools in whichever way will best get the job done. Today’s multimedia journalist, whether experienced or just starting out, whether working for an established media outlet or for herself, needs to make sure she has the following skills and tools.