No matter the medium, stories will still be here
By Machiko Yasuda
June 5, 2010 10:20 p.m.
Taken at face value, this is not your grandmother’s newspaper.
More color photographs. Fewer classified advertisements. Live streaming video, Twitter updates, and the most nebulous term of all: multimedia.
Over the past four years that I have worked at this paper, we’ve slowly transformed the look of the paper, both online and offline. We even started appearing in your Facebook news feeds and YouTube searches. (Or at least we try to.)
Sure, we’re still a daily collegiate print newspaper, but the news updates are coming to you at all times of the day, sometimes as short text updates or even a live video broadcast.
Journalists love their jargon, and they’ll jumble all these new technologies into classifications like new media, multimedia, social media. And there are even worse words: hyperlocal, narrative-driven stories, convergence and whatever other fancy terms they can coin.
Ultimately, though, I want to assure you: Newspapers may be evolving forms, but journalism is not. You aren’t always watching video from your television sets anymore. You aren’t listening to your favorite band on your dad’s Walkman. And you certainly aren’t buying Daily Bruin classified ads to find your next roommate.
A few years from now, this paper edition of the Bruin might also turn into something completely digital. Who knows? We may be appearing on screens instead of paper, but the drive to tell stories about your community is all the same. Whether it’s the student government, the athletics, the not-so-scandalous crime notice or the story behind whoever is digging up your empty cans of Bud Light in the middle of the night ““ you will find those stories here. In whatever form.
If there’s one thing I’ve taken home with me as part of the New Media department (previously known as Online and Electronic Media), it’s that simple fact: Journalism is not, in fact, changing. Gurus can predict the death of newspapers or whatever they’d like, but our mission for storytelling will remain as long as we can keep the interest of you ““ readers.
And your grandmother, too.
Yasuda was the director of New Media for 2009-2010. She was also the Online editor for 2007-2008 and an assistant editor of Electronic Media.
