Last week the Chicago Tribune told employees it was eliminating 20% of the newsroom staff. A story on the move reports the Trib last month "mixed copy editing, page design, graphics, imaging and
some photo editing into a single department, creating new job
descriptions that will combine copy editing with graphics and photo
editing with design."
Let's play that back: Copyediting with graphics … and photo editing with design.
I suppose I can imagine one person being good at photo editing and design. But … copyediting with graphics? (I once wrote on the birthday card of a graphic designer, "It doesn't matter what I write here because you never read the copy anyway." Did that make her mad? No, because she never read it.)
To a combination football player/editorial hand like me, that's like combining "place kicker and offensive tackle."
Well, wait a minute. Maybe we're going back to a time before super-specialization, when everybody had to know a little about everything. And maybe, in the long run, that's not all bad.
I’m torn on this.
On the one hand, is it good for people in our profession to know “a little about everything”? I think the answer to that is definitely – yes!
On the other hand though, there’s a big difference between “knowing” a little about a number of things, and being completely responsible for those many things as an expectation of your job. Particularly when, as in the case of the newspapers who are doing this, the people who are likely to end up with these newly combined roles, have probably only had training in ONE of the key responsibilities.
I’m all for expanding your skillset and becoming diversified as one of those new business approaches touting us all to “be your own consultant” but when an employer simply drops a completely different set of responsibilities on you without training or assistance, that is a recipe for disaster – for both the employee and the organization.
Unless the Trib’s plan for these newly combined roles includes some sort of training on the “extra” skillsets required, this strikes me as yet another example of clueless executives going: “Well, can’t ANYBODY do graphics stuff? Let’s just add that to the work the copy editors are doing, because THAT’s something anyone can do too, right?”
Insert my eye-roll here.
Yes, I’m as torn as Lou Groza’s pants crotch. You make a number of good points. My openness to the idea of the jack-of-all-trades journalist is partially based on my belief that jacks of all trades are happy and capable people even if they’re not usually masters … and it’s partially based on nostalgia.
I look back happily to my days reporting, writing and editing the weekly Ragan Report. I was 26, 27, 28, and enjoying the hell out of every aspect, from the interviews to the writing, even to the layout, which I did on Pagemaker. Well, it wasn’t really layout, but rather pouring copy into the simple two-and-three-column layouts.
The publication probably never went out without a typo in it somewhere–proofreading was mostly done by other young editors, one of which was invariably hung over, the rest of which were rushing to make a deadline of their own.
The publication wasn’t perfect, but it was alive with my youthful energy and my enjoyment of all aspects … and I like to think that made it a good read.