Next week it’s Tabloid Day at the newspaper were I’m working, last months all hands on every deck having been busy preparing , restyling, learning new tricks, and, pretty important, learning how to write shorter (and better).
Temporarily there’s not as much attention for Internet and multimedia as there should be, but that’s gonna be alright, in time to come. If not out by vision, then because of the market: publishers that don’t take part in the Internet rat race, will find themselves empty handed at the finish – that is, if there ever will come and end to the race.
Most of my colleagues don’t seem to understand it yet, but there’s De Nieuwe Reporter (The New Reporter) to tell them it’s paramount that they start blogging.
In Dutch at @ DutchCowboys
Listen to Jeroen Mirck: Ladies en gentlemen journalists, you are sleeping. You’re either sleeping or you are neglecting the most important trend in a decade, but you’re feeling pretty satisfied about it. Most of you have written that Time Magazine has chosen me (you too) as Person of the Year 2006, but at the same time you are sneering about user generated content, thinking and saying it’s all too unimportant to add anything to your profession.
You are so wrong
And that’s why a lot of you will lose their job in the coming years. Luckily enough there’s one remedy: you have to start blogging. Not only the Internet freaks under the editors, but each and everyone of you. Or else you’ll be first in line when the pinks slips are presented.
The last sentence in previous quotation is not right. At least yet, here in Holland its impossible to receive a pink slip just like that. You might get kicked out eventually, but not before your boss has obliged tot a large set of rules, known as so called social plans or outsourcing rules and regulations, whatever. But so far I’ve never seen the B-word in all the paperwork accompanying redundancy.
Nevertheless; should you worry, my dear colleague, but non-blogger?
Well, maybe not right away, but you’d better take a subscription on the RSS feeds or the newsletter of De Nieuwe Reporter, to learn and understand what this B-phenomenon might mean for your profession, your future.
Mircks final words: Do I exaggerate? Of course not. You exaggerate when you think I’m talking bullshit. Keep thinking so, If you like, but don’t start sulking when we stuff and mount you in a nature museum, like a frozen brontosaur.
In the end of the day it will be a blogger who puts the lights out over there.
Who knows, it might even be a journalist blogger, but that’s up to you . . .