Guest Speaker — BJ Lewis

I really enjoyed Tuesday’s guest speaker in Online Journalism.  BJ Lewis from the Denton Record-Chronicle gave some insightful knowledge about the current landscape of the print side of journalism and it’s implementation of “new media” on the web.  Unlike most of the students in the class, BJ Lewis was a new editorial major as opposed to electronic news.  He said he wishes he was in our shoes to have a bit more training behind the camera.  That’s pretty relieving considering the training and education we’ve received on how to shoot a story and how to tell a story with a camera.  What’s not relieving is that they are training older staff writers on camera and still photography.  The only way they are doing that, it seems, is by threatening their jobs with “someone who knows how to write a story and use cameras.”  If they are willing to learn it seems those of us with the actual skill set will still be hard pressed to find a job especially in a worsening economic climate.  He also said he is paid salary and works with digital media on his free time as part of his job.  What it seemed like was that he wasn’t being fully compensated for his skills set.  One reason for this might be that it is now expected that you write, shoot, edit, etc.  He started as someone who just wrote stories who then picked up a camera.  In my mind, if I’m getting paid to do one thing, I’m not going to add onto my workload without an addition to my wallet.  While this is considered “journalism of the future,” it’s the not future that I’m willing to accept.  While editors and media executives can threaten their current employees with replacing them with “better, faster, smarter, tech-savvy” college graduates who will work on the cheap, I don’t think we should be the ones who are making crappy pay.  We might not have been in the business as long as some people, but we have more skills and should earn higher wages.  Skills should always outweigh experience.  If you write crappy articles for 20 years and a good writer comes along, who deserves the job?  The more skilled person.  The same should apply to new media but the reflection BJ Lewis gave was that it didn’t.