If you’re old enough, you remember when reporters wrote stories on IBM Selectric typewriters. Switching to a PC was huge.
Well, that’s nothing compared with the changes happening in the news business now. Print is out. Digital is in. Newspapers are suffering, online publications flourishing.
While some people lament these changes, others see opportunity. One of them is John S. Carroll, former editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times. Carroll spoke of the changes facing the news business to journalism students at the University of Kentucky on April 1, 2008, saying, “The current period in journalism is, in fact, historic. It is epochal. It is remarkable, perhaps even unprecedented. I’m speaking, of course, of the passage of journalism into the digital age.”
He told journalism students that they’ll be working with tools unlike any imagined by earlier generations:
“You will have new tools for finding things out, and tools to send your stories to the entire world at the speed of light,” he says. “Journalism has always been a one-way bulletin from journalist to public. Now it is a conversation with millions of participants, which gives us access to new facts and new ideas.”
And he expressed hope that new media will continue in the journalistic tradition of:
“enriching the national conversation, keeping the old media honest and creating entirely new languages of journalism. I also hope that they’ll find ways to make more money and thereby to employ reporters in meaningful numbers.”
Read the complete text of John Carroll’s speech here.