New Formats, New Stories, But Journalism Remains Crucial in Digital Era

By, Marcus Kabel, Vice President, Atlanta

This article originally appeared on Edelman.com.

It’s natural to look across the media industry and wonder if the digital upheaval of legacy formats will leave anything standing. The core mission of storytelling itself is morphing, whether by requiring new elements like video and interactives, integrating the audience through social media or using analytics to get a better understanding on impact. As a former journalist who spent 20+ years in newsrooms at Reuters and the AP, I wonder sometimes if journalism itself is headed for retirement in a new era of something more direct, crowd-sourced and visceral.

But then I look at the people and skillsets that are populating this digital and mobile landscape and realize that journalism remains highly relevant. Many of the high-profile leaders of purely digital enterprises come from old-school newsrooms. Even before Katie Couric swapped broadcast TV for Yahoo!, Buzzfeed recently hired Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Schoofs, who had been at The Wall Street Journal and then ProPublica, to head a new investigative unit. Others who came up through the new media world took on legacy titles and positions at long-established media institutions in order to better transmit their messages to the world. I’m thinking here of Glenn Greenwald, and I’ll come back to him in a moment. So while the shape and feel of digital stories may be different, the ability to draft and present a compelling tale based on reportable facts is more necessary – and gets more attention – than ever. In other words, the jobs are changing, but the journalism remains.

Last month alone saw Jim Roberts, who spent 26 years at the New York Times before a stint at Reuters Digital, move to Mashable as executive editor and chief content officer with a brief to help it expand coverage. Twitter also got the urge for a stronger journalism side and hired NBC News chief digital officer Vivian Schiller as its head of news. More recently came word that the new, as-yet unnamed digital media venture of billionaire Pierre Omidyar has hired Eric Bates, the former executive editor of Rolling Stone, to bolster ranks that already include political journalist Dan Froomkin, who spent 12 years at The Washington Post before leading The Huffington Posts’s D.C. coverage.

Omidyar’s venture, of course, first made headlines last month by hiring NSA reporter Glenn Greenwald away from The Guardian. Greenwald’s saga is an interesting illustration of the relevance of journalism from another angle. He started as a blogger with no formal journalism training, back when “citizen-journalist” was the nicest thing that professional media would say about this new breed of digital correspondent. His national security coverage won him a spot at Salon.com as a contributing writer and then an appointment The Guardian as columnist – an old-world title if there ever was one. The Guardian’s global reach and credibility as a news source helped Greenwald spread the word of the NSA material provided by contractor Edward Snowden. Greenwald’s story harkens back to the days before graduate degrees became the norm in journalism, when people came to the craft from all backgrounds (Greenwald was previously a lawyer) and learned it by doing.

In the digital era, Greewald’s professional success across platforms from paper to smart phones underscores my contention: The journalist’s core storytelling toolkit is still in demand. The growing movement of experienced journalists from traditional newsrooms to digital ventures just adds more proof that even if the media are changing, the journalism remains.