At the end of December I will have officially been with the Airdrie City View and Rocky View Weekly for three months. I’ve learned a lot in that time; what’s news and what isn’t, how to cover certain stories, and what questions to ask and how to ask them. Like in everything I do I want to get better at these things and ultimately my goal is to be the best journalist that I can be.
There are of course a lot of things that I have learned in the last three months that I didn’t really think about before I started this job, or at least I was aware I just wasn’t constantly thinking about it.
It has to do with how and why the news is covered and presented in our day and age. It’s very content driven and click based, with so many outlets looking to drive as much engagement as they possibly can to their website or posts, the news has become very reliant on quick hits.
A lot of this is due to social media inundating our shrinking attention spans with 30 second videos or 50 word tweets at all hours of the day, every day. Not to say there is anything wrong with this–the advent of the 24 hour cable news cycle and social media-centric journalism definitely has a lot of upside.
For starters, no one wonders about the news anymore, there is virtually no disconnect between live events and our ability to learn about them, which has made the world feel all the more interconnected.
I am a great lover and appreciator of long-form narrative journalism you might see in magazines and books.
I love the stories they tell because of the depth and detail that's allowed in them and ultimately I would love to do something like it–in fact it’s why I wanted to start a career like this.
My only worry is that the world’s media consumers might be becoming less and less interested in those types of stories. That fear is reinforced every time I see a magazine business lay off staff or a website shutdown because they can’t afford to operate.
Institutions like The New Yorker and others of that calibre will probably always be around, but I hope the market and the desire for stories like those told in those types of magazines continue on into the future.
There are more knowledgeable experts that have written about the fragile state of journalism today and the issues facing newsrooms are nuanced and too varied to talk about in this little column.
I just hope that the effect of quick-hit news and social media overstimulation is a bug and not a long term feature.
