Backpack Journalists

When I left my high school newsroom to head to university known for its journalism program, I thought it was the last time I was going to be able to experience journalism as a cooperative undertaking, as opposed to the competitive field that it generally seems to be. That was before a man I like to call B.S. Brooks told me about a little thing called convergence journalism.
Although I agree that a do-it-ALL-yourself journalist is most likely not going to be able to produce the superb package that a specialized team would, the idea that a journalist is not, at a given point in his or her career, confined to a small aspect of the field is reassuring. I, being an indecisive person with a restless attention span, like the fact that I could go to work one day as a photographer and the next day, suggest an idea for a graphic, then create it exactly as I envisioned it. That journalists are now more able to understand and to dabble in the entirety of their field seems like it creates a newsroom that goes beyond, “I’ll scratch your back,” to a truly cooperative workplace in which a sharing of ideas, responsibilities, and skills is the norm. The community, those people that we are working for, benefits from this cooperation when the outcome is a journalism in which they can participate, and to suggest that “backpacking”, well-rounded journalists should be used sparingly could possibly reverse this open connection.