It's a Job, but Is it Journalism?

Before Robin Sparkman graduated from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in May, she dutifully sent out her cover letters and resumes to New York-based magazines, and spent four months talking back and forth to one of them about a reporting position. "Finally they called me and asked me if I wanted to be a fact-checker," she says, with disdain. "Can you believe it?" Twenty-seven years old, she felt she'd already done her share of fact-checking, for Newsweek, and leaving New York was out of the question. So she did what dozens of other young journalists did this summer: landed a job at MSNBC.

 There has never been an obvious or easy first step for young journalists on the road to a successful career. That is still true. But budding journalists do have new options these days, in new media, which offers a way to hit the ground running and, for better or for worse, to avoid unpaid internships and small-town newspaper jobs. Journalism-school grads, semi-seasoned reporters, and untested twenty-year-olds are all heading to online jobs for the money, the opportunities, and the excitement of seeing a new kind of journalism unfold. Their titles range from "associate editor" to "assistant producer" to "production associate." Some are thrilled, some are disillusioned; some are writing, some are coding HTML. Some are finding real journalism in this new world, and some are not.

 Sparkman, for one, is an "online producer," which she says means: "I'm thinking about content design and product."

 Um, what?

 She takes CNBC-TV shows and puts them up on the Web, reworking sound and video into an online form, a process somewhat like turning TV back into print. "Right now I'm not doing traditional journalism -- reporting and writing -- and I definitely strongly miss the writing part."

 Sparkman nonetheless believes that MSNBC was right to hire someone like herself with a journalism background, someone with news judgment and certain standards. "Because it's so new, there are no rules," she says. "So it all comes down to me and my not putting garbage on the Web."

 This first generation of online journalists has no professional model, so "there's a loose atmosphere," says Vladimir Edelman, twenty-two, an associate producer at MSNBC. He is also the co-founder, with Emily Field, also twenty-two, of the Interactive Media Writers Association (http://www.imwa.com), an online organization meant to encourage discussion about writing standards in this new electronic medium.

 "Looseness," of course, is a friend of the young and ambitious. After working for Inc. Online, Edelman was recruited by MSNBC this summer. "It's sort of a window of opportunity that opens in history very rarely," Edelman says, "to establish yourself amid really professional journalists, in what would take a decade normally."

 And the window seems to be widening. A recent "New York New Media Industry Survey" by Coopers & Lybrand estimates that the new media industry employs 71,500 in the New York area alone and expects that number to increase by between 40,000 and 120,000 new jobs through 1998. These jobs will include programmers, designers, and administrators, but there's plenty of room for eager, techno-savvy journalists.

 Not all will stay so eager. Some online journalists have been frustrated, especially those working for the Web sites of established print publications. The sites, they say, often feel like afterthoughts, marked by too much repurposing -- morphing print stories into Web format. It's not that repurposing is inherently a bad thing, it's just that doing it doesn't make for a very interesting journalism job.

 Publications like The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com), the San Jose Mercury News (http://www.sjmercury.com), and the Raleigh News and Observer (http://www.nando.net) have tried to approach their sites with some imagination by adding original content, hypertext sidebars, and other enhancements to repurposed pieces. Along with repurposed content, for example, The New York Times offers "CyberTimes," a section reserved for reporting on Internet-related issues, most of which is original. Editor Rob Fixmer says good journalists are the key to making this kind of project superior. But they have to learn that the inverted pyramid style doesn't work online, he says; you can't assume that the reader starts with the lead and ends with the kicker. "We have to conceive of the stories in the medium's own terms," says Fixmer. "That means thinking links rather than sidebars."

 Seth Effron, forty-four, executive editor of the well-regarded Nando Times, affiliated with the Raleigh News and Observer, says that this shift in organization is why he hires less-experienced journalists along with practiced veterans: "they don't have preconceived notions."

 Thirty-four-year-old Laura Italiano is one experienced journalist who's quite happy with the inverted pyramid, thank you very much. She spent eight months last year as a free-lance consultant for New Jersey Online (http://www.nj.com), where she did some reporting (see "Launching the Pope in Cyberspace," CJR, January/February). But "it was not journalistically satisfying," she says. "You're sitting at a computer writing about people sitting at computers."

 Now she's working for the New York Post, and loving it. "Last week they sent me out to cover Hurricane Fran," she said in September. "I was out at an elementary school in Hampstead, North Carolina, and the roof was blowing off, and I had a notebook and a pen. I was the most low-tech journalist. It's a blast."

 The young people who seem happiest in new media are those whose jobs include reporting, writing, editing -- journalism, in short, at least similar to what they might be doing had they chosen print. How much room for this journalism there will be in the online world of the future, however, is open to debate.

 Mark Stahlman, co-founder of the New York New Media Association and a multimedia consultant, is one who insists that there'll be no pot of gold for journalists at the end of the infosuperhighway. "The essence of new media is that it's a two-way process. Talk radio is closer to new media than Slate is," he says of the Michael Kinsley/Microsoft e-zine. Stahlman thinks new media is about creating conversations and connections, and that's where the growth will be.

 Today only 8 percent of people go online for news once a week or more, according to a Pew Research Center study, and nobody has yet figured out a viable way to make online journalism profitable.

 Neither of these facts has slowed down many journalism schools' rush to teach new media. Dean Brent Baker at Boston University's school of communication says proudly, "We are wired!" A retired admiral, Baker speaks with military-style enthusiasm about how he was hired to "kick the college into the twenty-first century." Since 1992, he's built two major multimedia labs for the school, and "on the front of the catalog is a computer -- not a quill pen or a typewriter or any of that crap."

 He's convinced that his students won't make it in journalism if they stick with a single dimension, and points out that his print graduates are making $20,000, while those going into new media are bringing in between $45,000 and $65,000; the brave -- and rich -- new world, he suggests, is one of multimedia.

 MSNBC's Vladimir Edelman, a graduate of Baker's journalism program, agrees, but believes that young journalists' open door to online jobs today will soon be quietly closing. "It's an incredible opportunity," he says, "but I think it'll shut down in about half a year. A lot of older people are starting to catch on."

 They're starting to catch on to the bold facts that HTML coding isn't difficult; that the mumbo-jumbo lexicon of hyperlinks, repurposing, and URL's is pretty easy to grasp after a few hours of Web surfing; and that all you need to become a production associate, or even a "Webmaster," at an online publication is the ability to write and think. Places like MSNBC, meanwhile, already have templates of HTML codes, an innovation that shears countless hours and headaches from the repurposing process. It's all starting to look less and less like rocket science and more and more like . . . something else.

 "I don't know if it's journalism," admits MSNBC's Robin Sparkman, "but it's interesting."

Profiles:

Mark Hull, Online editor, Mercury Center
Bill Frischling, Online producer, Digital Ink Company
Marcy Harbut, Staff writer, EarthLink Network
Tricia Smith, Free-lance writer
Michael Broadhurst, Interactive news reader, The Wall Street Journal
Cyrus Krohn, Assistant editor, Slate
T. Trent Gegax, Online reporter, Newsweek Interactive

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