Curmudgeons threaten innovation and innovators

There’s been a lot of talk on the blogs lately addressing the crusty old thinkers in the media. Ryan Sholin urged the new thinkers to declare independence from the tribe, while Pat Thornton argued that curmudgeons can’t save journalism — innovation will.

Thornton believes clinging to the past and berating the new won’t keep the ship afloat:

Enthusiastic, bright-eyed, thoughtful and energetic interns and journalism students — the kinds of people we’ll need to turn this industry around — are being told to find a new career by angry journalists.

Curmudgeons are certainly dangerous to journalism, but now they’re making threats like Jon Talton who reaches for his gun whenever citizen journalist is uttered. Satire aside his argument is classic curmudgeon (redundancy?):

As for “citizen journalists,” they used to be called tipsters, and they can bring value. Devices such a camera-equipped cell phones, text-messaging and computers on wi-fi allow everyday people to send in information, some of which might be newsworthy.

Here’s a problem. These “tipsters” don’t need us to put their information in a chute to the masses anymore. The information sources have the means to publish to the world too, leaving journalism with a new goal — context.

But their use calls for vigilant editing – at a time when the old roles of newspaper editors have morphed into a maelstrom of attending meetings, slinging copy and gathering doo-dads for graphics. I wonder if the care and quality are still being applied many places.

“Doo-dads?” Again we’re stuck with traditional roles of gatekeeping and filtering instead of contextualizing and packaging. How many times do we have to say it? People want interactivity, speed, digestible data not pages and pages of copy. The editor managing graphics, copy and ideas will see success instead of his 1920s counterpart.

More importantly, “citizen journalists” generally can’t and won’t do the work that has been performed by paid professionals. Journalism has seen its share of the lazy and knavish. But in general, these professionals have for decades provided an invaluable, and irreplaceable, public service in a democracy.

Uh oh. High-falutin’ rhetoric from the Woodward and Bernstein club. Yes, journalism plays the democratic watch dog. There’s also more to it now. Government corruption, business scandal, shady dealings and crime … not everyone can cover this stuff. Some journalists cover county fairs and research local businesses. This is where new ideas and innvoation, like citizen journalism, shines.

But who wants to work with people like Talton? Would you continue to sing praises of newer methods, presentations, and business models to a guy who fantasizes about physical violence over hearing something new?

Curmudgeonly attitude doesn’t stop with quelching citizen journalism, they stop innovators within the newsroom as well. Pat Thornton outlined an example of an innovator, Braden Nicholson, who left Indy.com because of curmudgeonly attitude which followed him after his depature.

OK folks, this is not how you keep your industry alive. The people willing to take risks will leave and journalism enterprises will be stuck without change and consumers will ignore newspapers and poorly run news sites creating an endless spiral. Oh, wait — that happens now.

Saving journalism won’t come from the past, it’ll come from the future. Get that through your heads newsroom dinosaurs, or you won’t have a product left to hawkishly defend with examples of “the good old days.”

The rest of us will continue looking at the “great nowadays.”