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The rapidly changing face of newsrooms
Posted By katie allison granju
It was a sad day in TV journalism yesterday, as several CBS stations across the country announced big staff layoffs.
At KPIX in San Francisco, where former Tennessee blogger Brittney Gilbert was hired as the full time newsroom blogger last November, a number of very well respected reporters were given their walking papers.
Britnney blogged about the changes in her newsroom yesterday, and the changes in journalism that are transforming the industry:
I can’t quite describe how strange it is to be writing about this situation from where I sit. I have only been employed at KPIX since mid-November when I was hired to do a job that didn’t exist before. Full-time blogger at a news station is not a common position, in fact, it’s pretty rare (though becoming more and more common). Having a newsroom staffer monitor and produce blog(s) as their sole responsibility is not something even I, a blogger since 1999, would have imagined five years ago. Now stations across the country are making new media, social networking and online publishing a priority as advertising dollars are moving from the silver screen to the computer screen. They are hiring up bloggers who are well-versed in internet news and culture to manage those web properties. Some would debate that a position like this is superfluous, and frankly, they’d have a lot of good arguments, no doubt. Other still would say that the landscape of news dissemination is morphing so quickly that to ignore new media innovations like blogging is a death knell. Those people, too, have many valid points.
It is undeniable that, despite current economic trends that do not bode well, the t.v. news and newspaper business is struggling. They are struggling to catch up to the power of the web which has, in many ways, robbed them of many of their most valuable assets. News gets made online and broken online before traditional media types can even react. Not their fault, exactly, the machine is just too huge and cumbersome. Mainstream media organizations simply aren’t as nimble as independent online newsmakers. However, what the machine lacks in dexterity, it makes up for in spades with exclusive contacts, years of knowledge and hard-won reputation. It’s a morphing industry, no doubt about it. These cuts are an illustration of that inevitable fact.
Ironically, it was a newsroom blogger - Brittney’s former colleague A.C. Kleinheider - who got the budgetary axe at WKRN just last month. Happily, Kleinheider has landed at The Nashville Post, where we are all waiting impatiently for him to start blogging (when’s that gonna be, ACK?).
Apr 2nd, 2008
