Online Journalist: Lower-Class Citizen?

I recently read a question posed to Joe Grimm on the Poynter Institute’s Web site. I feel it’s appropriate to acknowledge the question and answer because of an inaccurate assumption most seem to have about college journalists.

Because those in my age group have been raised with the luxury of the internet, one would think that the younger journalists would be devoid of any sort of negative attitude towards online journalism. However, in my experience at least, this could not be further from the truth.

My first run-in with online journalism being looked at as a “lower” version of print journalism is when I told my extended family that I was interning for Philadelphia Magazine’s Web site, Phillymag.com.

“You’re interning at Philadelphia Magazine? I love that magazine,” my aunt said.

“Yeah. I’m in the Web Department.”

“Wait…so you don’t actually intern for the magazine itself then, right?”

It was a response I quickly got used to hearing — others saying that a Web site was not to be valued anywhere near the amount the actual print publication was. However, whenever I would get a response similar to this one I would simply just disregard it as merely the response of older people who were not “up with the times.”

Cut to about a year later — when I tell the staff of my college newspaper that that I would like to switch positions from being A&E Editor of The Whit’s print edition to the Web Editor, I expected them to understand.

Wrong!

Instantly, I was hit with dozens of questions. “Why would you want to do that? You’re taking the easy way out!”

Previously, the position of Web Editor was held by the senior in his or her last semester who wanted to still work for The Whit but wanted to coast in their last semester of college.

Therefore, I was instantly called lazy.

I told them how The Whit’s Web site was light-years behind anything remotely modern and how it was in desperate need of a redesign. I told them how I wanted to add video, slideshows, podcasts, etc.

About half of them began to get it. I showed them other newspaper’s Web sites, showed them how they twitter, they have facebook pages, and then showed them ours (which was such in 2000), which seemed to drive home the point. I told them I wanted to work on all that for The Whit.

A few people were still behind the curve. Even now, months after I’ve taken over (and still waiting for the redesign to reach completion) there are some who are still confused.

“Do you miss the daily grind, Emily?” one editor asked me last week before hearing an endless speech from me about where our Web site is going and what we should be doing online.

It’s a funny thing to write down – saying that young people are in some way slightly reluctant to want to work in online journalism. My only assumption as to why this reluctance exists is that it this is how they were taught. They saw their parents read newspapers and magazines and throughout high school and college most news reporting classes are geared toward working in a newspaper.

Don’t get me wrong, there are PLENTY of students like myself who have a near obsession with it, but like anything else there are always QUITE a few who are traditionalists who refuse to accept that this is the way journalism is going. Most people are not even aware that such a conundrum even exists in college journalists, but believe me, college journalists struggle with this the same way journalists elsewhere struggle with it.