Feb. 12th, 2009 12:51 am
Today's adventuring
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textualdevianceSo, a couple of weeks ago, one of my profs contacted me out of the blue and asked if I'd speak to her online journalism class about my experiences as a button monkey content producer for a Major Internet Presence.
So, I got to go up and do that today. It was really quite strange, since I hadn't been back in B'ham since I graduated a year and a half ago. I didn't get to see all my old profs, which was a bummer, but I did see a couple of folks I recognized, which was cool.
The campus has changed a bit--there's a whole new building next to the Com building now. Very weird.
It felt good, though. I didn't feel overly nostalgic or like I was pining for lost youth (that happens when I visit Portland. Sigh...) I felt satisfied, in a way. Like I did what I came there to do four years ago, and it all worked out well and was a chapter of my life that I feel was successful. No regrets. No "what ifs" save for the few little bits of pining away for some of my hottie classmates with whom I would never have had a remote chance to hook up. ;)
The talk itself was rather funny, I suppose. I gussied up a little bit*, which sometimes helps me feel a bit more confident about giving presentations. (Yes, it's weird. Even with all my stage and performing and radio experience, I still have issues with giving presentations or speaking in front of a class or meeting. I have no idea why.)
I basically spent my whole hour in front of the class scaring the living crap out of them about their potential job prospects. I told them that they no longer had any excuse for not having tech skills, and that they'd better learn them now while they still had a chance, or they'd be losing future jobs to people who did have those skills. One gal asked me if I thought it was better to be a writer with tech skills or a techie with writer skills. I first told her that it depended on where she wanted to end up in terms of jobs: News reporting or content production. But then I also told her that there are two kinds of people in this biz who really piss me off:
1. Writers/editors who disdain technology or think it's inherently inferior to traditional methods of conveying information.
2. Techies who can't string together a coherent sentence in English.
I told her that if she could avoid falling into those two traps, she'd probably be OK. At least by me. ;)
Part of the problem in the industry as-is is that most of the people producing web content are techies with little to no background in proper writing. They may know how to get the content uploaded and have a basic concept of what it should look like in terms of design and formatting, but they really have no idea what to look for in terms of copy errors or coherent writing. And the screwy part is that these same folks are often tapped to write headlines, captions, summaries and other such things and end up failing miserably.
Conversely, there's also the issue with writers and editors sometimes being asked to build sites, and they end up churning out some horrid piece of flashy mcflasherson garbage. Bleh.
So I told them that really, what's going to be necessary is being a jack of all trades. You need to become what's sometimes called a "backpack journalist": Someone who knows how to get the story and write it; how to get photos and video and edit them and then format and upload the whole shebang on the fly. Because with the way news orgs are trimming staff, there simply won't be individual people doing all of those things anymore. They're going to have to rely on their reporters and editors to be able to do it all. Which means they're going to hire people who can, and fire the ones who can't.
I also hammered into them the necessity of proper copy, since instant publishing often means there are few, if any, copy passes before something makes it to readers. I told them that nothing pisses me off more than seeing egregious copy errors on a live content-focused site of any sort.
I also showed them some of the stuff I'd done for my last gig, and some of my current work, and explained to them the very basic basics of how HTML works. I'm guessing they'll get more of that later in the term. I hope.
I'm not a great judge of how groups of people are reacting to me unless they're actively engaged with what I'm doing, so I don't know how well I came off. The blank stares I was getting could've been rapt fascination or boredom or sheer, unadulterated terror about what I was saying. I dunno. My prof seemed to want me to come back at some point, so I guess I did OK.
Busy weekend coming up. A birthday party Friday and an engagement party Saturday. No word yet on any new jobs, but I'm sure something will come up eventually, and I'm fine with cooling my heels until then. I still have a novel to work on, LOTRO characters to level and Rock Band songs to master, so I'm good. ;)
So, I got to go up and do that today. It was really quite strange, since I hadn't been back in B'ham since I graduated a year and a half ago. I didn't get to see all my old profs, which was a bummer, but I did see a couple of folks I recognized, which was cool.
The campus has changed a bit--there's a whole new building next to the Com building now. Very weird.
It felt good, though. I didn't feel overly nostalgic or like I was pining for lost youth (that happens when I visit Portland. Sigh...) I felt satisfied, in a way. Like I did what I came there to do four years ago, and it all worked out well and was a chapter of my life that I feel was successful. No regrets. No "what ifs" save for the few little bits of pining away for some of my hottie classmates with whom I would never have had a remote chance to hook up. ;)
The talk itself was rather funny, I suppose. I gussied up a little bit*, which sometimes helps me feel a bit more confident about giving presentations. (Yes, it's weird. Even with all my stage and performing and radio experience, I still have issues with giving presentations or speaking in front of a class or meeting. I have no idea why.)
I basically spent my whole hour in front of the class scaring the living crap out of them about their potential job prospects. I told them that they no longer had any excuse for not having tech skills, and that they'd better learn them now while they still had a chance, or they'd be losing future jobs to people who did have those skills. One gal asked me if I thought it was better to be a writer with tech skills or a techie with writer skills. I first told her that it depended on where she wanted to end up in terms of jobs: News reporting or content production. But then I also told her that there are two kinds of people in this biz who really piss me off:
1. Writers/editors who disdain technology or think it's inherently inferior to traditional methods of conveying information.
2. Techies who can't string together a coherent sentence in English.
I told her that if she could avoid falling into those two traps, she'd probably be OK. At least by me. ;)
Part of the problem in the industry as-is is that most of the people producing web content are techies with little to no background in proper writing. They may know how to get the content uploaded and have a basic concept of what it should look like in terms of design and formatting, but they really have no idea what to look for in terms of copy errors or coherent writing. And the screwy part is that these same folks are often tapped to write headlines, captions, summaries and other such things and end up failing miserably.
Conversely, there's also the issue with writers and editors sometimes being asked to build sites, and they end up churning out some horrid piece of flashy mcflasherson garbage. Bleh.
So I told them that really, what's going to be necessary is being a jack of all trades. You need to become what's sometimes called a "backpack journalist": Someone who knows how to get the story and write it; how to get photos and video and edit them and then format and upload the whole shebang on the fly. Because with the way news orgs are trimming staff, there simply won't be individual people doing all of those things anymore. They're going to have to rely on their reporters and editors to be able to do it all. Which means they're going to hire people who can, and fire the ones who can't.
I also hammered into them the necessity of proper copy, since instant publishing often means there are few, if any, copy passes before something makes it to readers. I told them that nothing pisses me off more than seeing egregious copy errors on a live content-focused site of any sort.
I also showed them some of the stuff I'd done for my last gig, and some of my current work, and explained to them the very basic basics of how HTML works. I'm guessing they'll get more of that later in the term. I hope.
I'm not a great judge of how groups of people are reacting to me unless they're actively engaged with what I'm doing, so I don't know how well I came off. The blank stares I was getting could've been rapt fascination or boredom or sheer, unadulterated terror about what I was saying. I dunno. My prof seemed to want me to come back at some point, so I guess I did OK.
Busy weekend coming up. A birthday party Friday and an engagement party Saturday. No word yet on any new jobs, but I'm sure something will come up eventually, and I'm fine with cooling my heels until then. I still have a novel to work on, LOTRO characters to level and Rock Band songs to master, so I'm good. ;)
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