Mike is the photo director at the Arizona Republic. First, he flips through two of the papers to see how the Republic compares. He looks for what they do best, and what they could do differently. Then he looks at the Republic.

“I get excited to see the pictures that I helped edit, knowing the stories behind them and how we chose a photographer to go out to shoot them and the stories behind that,” he said.

However, for many news consumers, it seems that the internet is where they like to see their news. As newspaper subscriptions decline, more people turn to the web for free news. It has many advantages: video, sound, slideshows and other multimedia pieces all in a nearly unlimited space.

In Mike’s opinion, journalists should learn to use this unlimited space to make content relevant and interesting again.

Time for Journalism to Re-examine, Fine Tune?

Because the field is so wide and the future so unknown, it’s difficult to say anything concrete about the next platform journalism will expand to. However, Mike was able to offer some short-term insight into what he believes the field should be focusing on.

“I think we’ve advanced so much in the last five years that it’s not so much where we’re going to go next, but how we fine tune where we are,” he said. “We really jumped into the internet, we jumped into video. What I’m hearing now is, ‘What’s working well? What isn’t?’”

I hadn’t looked at things from this point of view before. Could journalism be getting too far ahead of itself? Does it need to learn how to make things “relevant” again, as Meister suggests?

Much the talk I hear around the Cronkite School is that people are apathetic about news because there is so much of it. We have an ‘information overload’ problem. Perhaps by taking the time to really delve into the tools we have now, we can learn to captivate consumers with relevant content again.

As Mike put it, how do we make what we do for the newspaper work so that people still want to pick up the paper, but also want to go online and see an extension of the newspaper that print can’t provide?

This could be the biggest challenge that the field faces. How does it attract new users? New multimedia experiences online could be the answer.

A Photojournalist’s Expanding Skills

I often get the feeling that traditional photojournalism is a dying breed. No longer can photojournalists do only still photography, they must now do videos and slideshows and sound. Which is right for which story, and how do I know when to use each medium?

“Don’t pre-visualize what multimedia it should be,” Mike says. “Go out there and listen, feel what’s going around you and then that decision will come to you.”

Even then, it doesn’t have to be boxed into one medium.

Recently, Brian Storm of MediaStorm visited the Cronkite School to speak to students about multimedia and the amazing stories that his company tells. They use a variety of platforms, with videos that incorporate both still photography with sound as well as actual video footage.

I spotted Mike and a team of Republic photographers on the top balcony at the event, and I wanted to know if they were doing anything with video or multimedia production.

It turns out the photographers at the Republic already produce video content for the website as well as for Channel 12, the news station that recently merged with the paper.

“We’ve done some incredible things that [Channel 12 has been] so receptive to, and it’s opened up their eyes and made them see that they are a TV station but they can use videos with a very photojournalistic feel to them,” Mike said.

To me, this is an indicator that photojournalists with video skills are what newspapers will be looking for in the future. Time for me to pick up a video camera and some audio equipment, and fellow aspiring photojournalists might do well to do the same.

Journalists Love a Good Story

From what I’ve seen, journalists are naturally curious creatures. Many of us choose this profession because we love to find new angles and tell new stories.

However, I get intimidated by the idea of asking someone to open up to me in that way.

Mike said there are several things to keep in mind when looking for a story to tell:

1. Curiosity – this will help guide you to stories. “What tweaks your curiosity, what do you want to know more about? That’s your story.”
2. Trust – the subject must trust you before they open up to you. Be compassionate and human with them.
3. Time – “People’s lives are not in the 30 minutes that you go out there, it’s 24 hours a day.” Be prepared to go on assignment at all times of the day or night, and to go back multiple times.

What drives journalists to tell these stories, day after day?

“Everyday when we go to bed we think about what we’ve done that day and what we can do tomorrow and we wake up excited to do it,” Mike said. “If you take that away from us it’s like cutting off our heads. This is all we know. This is what we do best. We tell stories, and if we can’t tell stories that really goes to the heart. We live our work. It’s part of us, it’s engrained in us.”

I met Bill last semester when I interned at the Republic, and several times in the newsroom we got to talking about the way the industry is changing.

After working in education for 20 years and writing freelance articles on the side, Bill was offered a job at the Republic. Since then, he has worked in several departments at the paper, though today he is on the same beat he started with: cops and the city.

The Daily and Tablet Format

Flikr for 3gstore.de.

There has been a lot of talk recently about newspapers transitioning to iPad and tablet formats.

Rupert Murdoch is jumping on the trend with his latest news venture: an iPad application called The Daily. Touted as “a category first” and a new innovation in how news is delivered, consumers will pay a subscription (99 cents a week, $39.99 a year) to download a daily copy of the publication. The day before the interview, I read Alan Mutter’s list of reasons why The Daily will either fail or succeed, and I wanted Bill’s take.

Both of us agreed that the industry could be heading towards a more interactive, digital format like the iPad. Bill said much of the feedback consumers give the Republic for its website are requests for a more interactive experience, though responders could not define what they meant by this.

The iPad could provide this more interactive experience that gets the reader to move buttons and play with articles and advertisements as if they were games.

I’ve had the pleasure of flipping through an iPad version of Wired magazine and I was delighted when I realized that on the touch screen I could push buttons and pull tabs to make new content appear. I felt more involved with the publication and the graphics provided a new interest to me. I can see how the format would appeal to readers.

Bill said he also sees the appeal in iPad applications. If The Daily proves successful, he believes people should watch for other publications to switch to a similar format.

“Watch this trend very carefully, especially at places like the Republic, because we can do that. We’ve got news-gatherers [to generate content for this format].”

Skills for Future Journalists

In his time at the paper, Bill has also taken pictures for the Republic, and it’s a skill he believes future reporters will need.

Several years ago, the paper began to send reporters out with digital cameras and asked them to be “mobile journalists,” reporting stories on the go with videos and pictures in the package. The video aspect never really took off, but Bill says many reporters in the newsroom are competent photographers and carry a still camera with them for basic shots.

On his mobile assignments, he began to photograph Valley residents with tattoos for a slideshow called Skin Deep. Though in the beginning he met resistance from editors who told him it wouldn’t get any page views, it is now one of the most popular slideshows on azcentral.com.

For those like myself, who are straddling the line between writer and photographer, the news is both encouraging and worrisome. That the paper needs to give reporters cameras is an indication of declining staff numbers in photojournalism departments, but it also means that there is a want for journalists who can do both.

I wanted to know what other skills and characteristics would make up the ideal journalist of the future, so here are a few of the ones Bill told me about:

• Ability to “write tight” – Compress your stories, cut out unnecessary words and information.
• Basic photography skills – As mentioned above, this is becoming crucial for all reporters in the newsroom.
• Curiosity – “I love daily journalism. I like going on little adventures and big adventures and writing about my adventures, and at the end of the day, I’m done with it and I go home and then I go do it again.”
• Interest in community - You care about what is going on in your community, and you have something to say about it.
• Desire to be heard - “Journalists want to be heard … and they want their name to be respected. It’s a wonderful feeling and very satisfying–you’ve achieved something.”

Final Thoughts

Just before we wrapped up the interview, he had this to say:

“I’ve had an up and down career, and I’ve won awards and done things. I’ve never won a Pulitzer Prize. But even if I haven’t been a great reporter, I’ve been a reporter and I did it and I’ll never tax myself with ‘You didn’t have the nerve to do it.’ I did have the nerve to do it, and I still have the nerve to do it, and I’ve stuck around through Armageddon.”

It’s no secret that newspaper circulation numbers are dwindling, though there may be some consolation in that it seems to be less of a free-fall than it was a year ago.

However, if I go to google right now and type in “newspapers are,” my first three options are “doomed,” “dying,” and “dead.”For a print journalism major, I find that a little disconcerting. Those who enjoy rustling through their daily paper may feel the same, and rightfully so.

Consumers are getting their news through other means, a trend aided by the growing numbers at sites like Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is growing at an alarming rate, reporting at least 300,000 new users registering with the social media site every day.

Social media has begun to change the way news is reported. Updates come in real-time and what is important can be filtered through friend’s news feeds. What is deemed relevant is spread through an electronic version of ‘word of mouth.’

It is yet to be determined if this is taking consumers away from mainstream media outlets or just changing the way people hear about news. The widely accessible and constantly updating nature of the internet has taken readership away from newspapers, but how social media will affect the media online is ever changing. Is it driving consumers to news or showing them that they can get information without traditional sources?

If publications learn to harness these technologies, Twitter and Facebook can bring a new dimension to coverage for major events like the recent turmoil in Egypt (though the citizen perspective has been hampered by the government’s internet blackout).

Such is the popularity of social media that even President Obama mentioned it in his State of the Union address, referring to America as a nation of “Google and Facebook.”

Newspapers and other traditional media outlets will have to begin to adapt to these changes. Many of them are already becoming more media savvy, and papers like The Seattle Times are using Twitter to their advantage by using it for real-time updates on stories.

But as news consumers begin to realize that they can get much of the same news online that they would get if they paid for a paper, some media outlets have begun to charge for online content in hopes of making up for lost subscription revenue.

The New York Times switched to this format last year, allowing visitors to its site to view a certain number of articles a month before they had to pay a fee to access more. (Those who already subscribe to the paper edition do not have to pay the online fee.)

Paywalls like this could turn people away from these sites, as there are still many other sources where they can find this information. BBC News, CNN and many others will provide comprehensive coverage of worldwide issues that may be hidden behind a paywall on the New York Times.

Will this restriction on content access drive consumers away? As publications search for the next big thing to sustain their business, what will happen to the number of journalists in the world? A decrease in revenue can lead to papers downsizing and furloughing reporters.

For those of us hoping to go into the field, this news is daunting.

Many a late night conversation with fellow journalism majors has turned to the topic of what is next for us. None of us seem to have a concrete idea of where we’ll be headed, and that could well be the norm even for those already in the industry.

Traditional media is changing, and with it so is the skill set required for up and coming reporters – though what it is changing into is unclear. It’s difficult to get a read on something that is still discovering and re-inventing itself, but I hope to use this blog to get a little closer to that pulse.