Equal Partners

By Anita Malik
December 23, 2008 03:43 PM

I’m the multimedia maven, right?

Yes, I push for more Web-savvy journalists, a greater understanding of multimedia packaging for business stories and a deeper focus on Web sourcing techniques, but I’m not a Web-only purist by any measure.

If you’re familiar with this column, you might be surprised that I’m a proponent of all mediums, both emerging and traditional. I believe in a balanced approach, not necessarily the mucked up version of convergence we are seeing play out in some newsrooms today, but what I call smart harmonies: the intelligent use of differing yet complementary media to impart information. No redundancy, no one-sidedness, just a seamless balance.

After a year that has stunted our forward movement as an industry, my theoretical discussion of the Web’s role in journalism seems almost exhausting, even to me. But I bring it up not to instruct on what we must do next, but to highlight one key word, a word marked with hope as we jump into 2009.

Complementary.

Take a step back from the buyouts and the layoffs and take heed that print is still a viable and necessary medium. The purging might not be over, but we aren’t done with paper just yet.

Many viewers still see their computers as a source of quick-hit news, workplace stress (there are full Web sites dedicated to managing such stress) and social networking. Long form journalism? Not so much.

Computers are often associated with the day-to-day hustle and bustle, the fast-paced lives we escape from only on weekends, on the couch with a good book…or magazine…or newspaper.

Print, in all its forms, offers a comfort that the laptop has yet to achieve. The glare of the screen just doesn’t have the same psyhcological impact. So while I admittedly dream of in-depth, multimedia packages across the board, we aren’t there yet. And even if we were, the written story would still be a vital component.

Multimedia excellence is achieved by the use of complementary mediums to tell all sides of a story. For layered, complex business stories – those that use numbers or deliver the results of months of investigation -- multimedia elements are a true value-add. They help us break down complexities and pull out numbers, but they are nothing without the story.  Printed words still have their own rightful place in business storytelling, and there are only so many words we can bear to read online.

The death of print is not here, not just yet. Magazines have always had a tough go, with a majority of glossy titles folding within one year, but that never stopped the industry from churning out more. So why should other print forms be any different? And why as reporters are we hung up on the medium in which are words are shared? Fight for good stories, no matter what the format. It is time to take a step back, realize that the media industry is caught up in the widespread economic downturn – as painful as they are, losses are to be expected - and look for a better way, a more lucrative way, a new way to target a changing demographic in changing times. It is not time to throw up our hands and give up.

Have hope as we enter 2009. The landscape has definitely changed and the Web is here to stay, but online gurus are not poised to be the winners here, they are simply your new, equal partners.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism