The ism

In print-land, there's a really high percentage of people who have no desire whatsoever to do reporting. There are the girls who come out and say "I just want to design pages," a flock of former creative writing types (myself included), aspiring columnists, and photographers who have a borderline sexual relationship with their $2000 SLR's.

And sitting in the newsroom, "look, I'm not going to be a reporter," is sort of a mid-level secret. Something you'd tell someone you met ten minutes ago, but you wouldn't want it announced in the middle of the newsroom.

Or on a blog, come to think of it.

That's why I spent the summer meeting reporter after reporter who'd check to see if anyone was looking, and then add, "just to be clear, I don't really want to be a reporter."

And so, when I meet someone who really likes the rough, dirty part of journalism, chasing sources and pursuing stories, my reflexive response is, "Good for you."

It takes a certain personality to really love doing that.

Speaking of certain personalities, it takes a certain personality to do this technical stuff. I've been called everything from "brilliant" (not true) to "psychotic" (that's okay). Which brings me to Wednesday night: most normal people don't find themselves thinking about how ACM is better at confusing people than managing content.

Here's what's going on: Prior to now, the Dot Com group rewrote all the news stories for web. Now the reporters do it. And that's a great idea, except it's very new, and the Dot Com people were never quite sure which stories are written up.

Meanwhile, there's no dashboard in the system that we can look and see what stories need what components. And in an open php based CMS, it'd be pretty easy to make an admin page for that.

Here's where we cross the line from "just thinking" to "OCD": there is a white board that is supposed to have all that on it. But... why shouldn't it be automated?

I stayed 20-30 minutes late to help a reporter export and copy her package to a harddrive, she was telling me that she just wanted to go out and be a general assignment reporter. I said "good for you," per usual, and started thinking...

Are all these back end people... the designers and the copy editors and the technocrats... are they really journalists? Yes, yes, they're all essential to journalism, since (until recently) you can't really deliver the content to an audience without some of these people. And because of the environment they work in and the people they collaborate with, the training and background is certainly a valuable asset to their professions. But is what they do journalism?

But then again, it's really just a pointless, hypothetical semantic rambling.