Well I've Never Been To Heaven. But I've Been To Oklahoma

My hometown paper is the Orlando Sentinel.

Before coming up to school, when I used to read the Sentinel regularly, I thought it was just a poorly-written rag that kept changing design philosophies and font sizes to make up for its shortcomings on the news front.

Then, when it launched Central Florida News 13, with its slogan, “All local, all the time,” I got a little more annoyed, because I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to hear about Central Florida for 24 hours a day.

In this handout, Rich Gordon uses the Sentinel as an example of a paper making strides in the revolution of the convergence of media outlets.

And now, with the benefit of a couple years of journalism school, I’m inclined to agree with him.

I think that the future of journalism, with all its bells and whistles, needs this convergence to maintain the level of quality it enjoys in the present. If a single, “backpack” reporter is expected to report on an event, write the story, record audio, shoot video, snap pictures, edit himself, create a short package about the event for television and whip up something for online, the quality of his work in one (if not more) of those areas will surely suffer. If a news organization can put together a team to cover this event, each person a specialist in his specific field, the presentation will not suffer across all the mediums.

Or so goes the theory.

But, as with all of my silver linings, here come the clouds.

Gordon brought up the problem of the objectivity of one arm of this convergence when covering stories dealing with the other arms. He used the example of a newspaper TV critic passing judgment on programming put on by the TV station with which the newspaper is affiliated. I imagine it would be hard to maintain your unbiased stance in this situation, when your boss and the boss of the station you just bashed probably summer together.

There is also the remote danger, and this is still far-fetched, of too much convergence: all the news organizations coming into one. Like last week’s Gillmor reading, I can foresee your typical Orwellian dystopia if all of the media falls under one umbrella.

On a side note, I thought it was funny that one of the most difficult obstacles to convergence was stereotypes the print and TV journalists had against each other.

I imagine a sort of Jets versus Sharks scenario when I think about this. And if you’ve been in as many rumbles as I have, you know it’s true.