” …Young journalists are less willing to stay at newspapers because the papers are so slow to change their culture.
Newspapers have a history as top-down organizations where senior management huddles in conference rooms to decide what everyone else will do. Innovative ideas usually die on the vine or in bureaucratic red tape. And that’s frustrating for young folks who want to be change agents at newspapers and make a difference.”
Read about it on MediaShift (here).
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You think it’s bad at newspapers, try being in a creative field in the government! My boss was a Marine combat photographer in Vietnam. Very stuck in his ways. It’s like punching bricks getting him to embrace new ideas.
Spoken like someone who has never worked at newspapers.
If anything, I want newspapers to go back to the old days when you would put the paper to bed and then play cards and drink in the newsroom until dawn (-well, according to my editor thats how it was anyways). If anything, people are leaving not because of some systemic lack of cultural change, rather for the following reasons:
1. everyone is getting laid off anyways, easier to just get out
on your own.
2. travel budgets are all gone
3. It is practically impossible to move up the ladder anymore. If you start out in a paper in the middle of Ohio (no offense intended Ohio) you will probably be stuck there forever. This voids the time honored tradition of working at the small paper, then getting a job at the medium paper, then the big paper.
4. salaries are a joke, often you would be better off as a convenience store manager
in a word; its the economy stupid
I don’t think Rob posted this article to comment solely on the slow pace of change at newspapers (but I may be wrong).
Most people who work for a corporate organization, whether it’s a newspaper, magazine or an interactive agency, will at one point or another run into all of the issues described in the article.
I’m a young person who enjoys “shacking the cage” as they say by ushering in change, and I can’t describe how frustrating it is to see a good idea die due to red tape.
However, I definitely learned a lot about myself by dealing with the corporate BS and it’s helped me in the long run (even though it’s still frustrating as hell).
There have been an increasing number of posts, recently, discussing the future of photojournalism. These have included a post by Vincent Laforet and an interview with Martin Parr. Fotovision.org has also mentioned these posts with regard to the future evolution of photojournalism.
I have been raising this subject for sometime now and have listed the relevant posts on this blog which includes Martin Parr’s recent article.
http://mikefoxphotojournalist.blogspot.com/2008/08/buzz-about-future-of-photojournalism.html
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