I don’t know if it owed to happenstance or deliberate scheduling by our crafty tutors, but last week, Cardiff JOMEC saw two guest-lecturers who were poles apart.
First was web-wizard, pioneer of the new cyber-journo age, and Web Development Editor, Joanna Geary.
Joanna’s lecture was unique because her relatively recent rise to success felt like more of a blueprint for how our own career might pan out (wouldn’t that be nice?). Listening to her talk about blogging and how it’s helped her, while perhaps not yet carrying the learned authority of someone like Mark Byford, really showed a viable model of this stuff can be used.
Two days later, I was privy to perhaps the most enthralling hour of my academic career: a lecture by former political editor to the London Evening Standard, Charles Reiss.
Tales from the backrooms of Westminster, where Charles built up high-profile contacts over many years, could not have been a further cry from Joanna’s meteoric ascendancy through being a social media pioneer. However, when taken together, I think we can learn from both.
The skills the now-retired Reiss built his career on (writing, newsgathering and generally buttering people up) are still necessary, but no longer sufficient. Similarly, being able to blog isn’t a big enough bowstring with which to arch.
The former must, if journalist traditions are to continue to hold the world to account, be cherished; yet without the latter, the platform for doing so in the modern age is soon-to-be non-existent.
Another issue raised by Geary is perhaps the most pressing in modern media today. Money.
Geary was understandably shady about The Times’ future plans, and we have since learned of her employers’ designs for the future of the Internet. However will this, as an Independent article I read from a Tweet by Alan Rusbridger himself, be undone by free ‘rogue players’ such as The Guardian? Even if it is, is this a bad thing?
Far more informed minds than I are surely toiling over this ethical and financial conundrum. For those of us who the answer will affect, it’s time to bait our breath.
