My biggest takeaway from the Online News Association (ONA) conference in New Orleans, Louisiana is this: journalists are working hard, but struggling to stay on top of the rapidly developing digital world.
This was ONA’s 20th anniversary.
I loved celebrating the 20th ONA conference with these three ladies.
In the last 20 years, what has been expected of journalists has shifted dramatically. Things, stories, experiences are being driven by social media and the news has had to adjust accordingly. This is really the reason ONA exists. Everything is online.
The sessions I went to and what I learned had more to do with doing journalism well on the internet than doing well in general. This is an important distinction since adding the element of “online” actually adds overwhelming layers of an infinite number of things to think about, pay attention to and address.
What do I mean by this? Well, rapidly developing technology and the vast world of virtual reality means:
- A journalist has to do it all: report, photograph, film, stay ever-present on social media, and also stay somehow human. Gone are the days of hiring a full-time photographer. This is something we have known for a few years now and did not come as a surprise to me at this conference. However, the reality of what that meant for journalists doing “just one thing” was made especially dauntingly apparent here.
- Journalism has to think vertically. For a long time, journalists have been thinking horizontally. Horizontally-shot photographs are what made the front page because that is what fit the layout best. Even when most of the news was digested on the computer or the television, journalists were still thinking horizontally since that is what fit those screens best. However, we have really rather suddenly entered a vertical world: the phone. The amount of conversations I sat in on surrounding how to grow a paper’s social media presence using vertical imagery shouldn’t have been surprising, but as a visual-thinker, I cannot bring myself to warm up to the idea of shooting video vertically or making a horizontal video fit a vertical screen.
- News outlets are creating positions not only for social media teams, but for audience editors who essentially exist to gauge social media response towards (what The Washington Post Senior Audience editor Everdeen Mason dubs) social media “experiments.” This means diving into analytics to determine beyond what went well, but to gauge why things did not go well, to come up with digital transformation strategies, to teach their reporters where their traffic is coming from, and to effectively develop an audience on all social media platforms. Yes, that even means some audience editors are thinking of ways to appeal to Tik-Tok audiences.
One session left me with a few tips and tricks for tackling a shift to a vertically organized digital world.
After this conference, I am not sure what the future of journalism is. All I know is what other journalists know:
- Good journalism is a necessity.
- Good journalism is going to have to keep up with the times.
But the issue with keeping up with the times is, more than being concerned with what we are leaving behind as we move forward into a digital world, we need to be aware of what we are taking with us.
As Rappler journalist Maria Ressa pointed out in her speech at ONA this year, “Colonialism moved online…Lies laced with anger and hate spread faster than boring facts.”
Journalists have a lot to do, it’s incredibly overwhelming, nobody knows exactly what’s next, but hey! The NOLA food was AMAZING.
Food. Such good food.
Annika Gordon
