Young Journalists

Those young journalists. Tsk-tsk. If we're not laying them off, they're leaving us because we -- newspapers, that is -- are too slow to change and adapt to the Internets.

Check out this interesting blog post by Mark Glaser, over at MediaShift. Glaser does a fascinating Q&A with Vickey Williams, a veteran journalist now affiliated with the Media Management Center at Northwestern University, where she is director of its Digital Workforce Initiative.

Glaser highlighted this quote from a report called "All Eyes Forward," about newsrooms working on reinventing themselves -- I mean, seriously reinventing themselves -- from the ground up:

"While a certain amount of turnover is expected and normal among the youngest practitioners of any craft — in pursuit of career advancement or reflecting a simple change of heart — these messages seemed different in both volume and intensity. A majority of younger journalists (age 29 and below) in nearly every pilot seemed to us to be saying, “We’re leaving because the changes we see as necessary aren’t happening fast enough."

The report, though longish, is a fascinating read (you'll find the PDF link in Glaser's post.) Ten smallish newspapers volunteered to reinvent their culture and position themselves better for change and survival. If you care about journalism, it's worth a glance.