The New Journalist’s Expanding Hat Stand

According to Ricardo Lopez of the Miami Herald, current and upcoming journalists are required to “wear many hats.” The time when a pen and paper cutting it is over and done with as we are launched fervently into tech savvy time period.

My warning to old school journalists: Watch out.

Call me crazy but I often get the feeling that older journalists like to look down their noses at us silly little “newbies,” even if just a little bit. They have, in the past, wanted to put the up and coming writers, photographers, and videographers in some assistant’s cubicle and forget about us for a few years. But we’re not having it.

The old cliché of a journalist being a guy in a trench with one of those goofy hats and a pencil behind his ear has changed a little bit. Now the current journalist wears sneakers, a backpack full of techie tools and approaches potential interviewees at a passionate jog, with release forms waving. Mid sentence we switch from photographer to videographer and back again. Our hats are a little goofier due to the fact that we’re probably wearing about five at a time.

No longer are we allowing ourselves to be forced into the cubicle, and be told to wait patiently for all the ones before us to die out or something – we’re taking to the streets. No longer is it necessary for us to start off in obits and hang out there for a few years while we wait for the story that’ll change our careers to just come along. Generation X – or are we Y? – is taking charge and taking the interviews.

U Tube, the internet in general and concepts like Current TV are allowing us the opportunity to tell the stories we want early on in our careers. We now have the chance to produce media packages of our own and let people actually see them. The time for suffering through ridiculous internships is over and done with as we take bigger steps over, around and above our older counterparts.

There’s been a bit of an upset in terms of the way things are done. We crazy rookies are refusing to “pay our dues” and are going right for the big time. We’re taking advantage of this online deal, and jamming all the latest and greatest hats on our heads all at once, with a ton of passion and for the simple reason: because we can.