Bloggasm

It’s time to flesh out your resumes. Newspapers aren’t hiring, we’re told, and when they do hire the job posting ineluctably includes that word, that half-assed nod that even the gnarled old newspaper curmudgeons have adopted as if they even know what it means: “Multimedia.”

Whenever I see that word I think of a blog post written by my friend Stephen Ward, titled, “Death of the Computer Guy.” Perhaps coming off a resume-shooting binge, Ward sheds any modicum of feigned omniscience and admits he doesn’t know everything related to his profession:

You wrote the cover letter. You submitted the resume. They knew who you were, what you could do, and why you were interested in the position before you even walked in the door. Now that you’re sitting down and talking, though, they throw you a curve ball. Can you do X? Um, no… of course you can’t do X. If you could, you would’ve said so by now! Besides, if they wanted someone who could do X, why didn’t they say that in the ad!?

If you’ve ever been on an IT job hunt, you’ve probably run into this problem before. Many potential IT employers have the mistaken notion that you’re just another “computer guy,” and that all computer guys must know X, Y, and Z. It’s just common sense, right?

I like to call this the myth of the computer guy. Far too many employers of IT personnel don’t understand IT themselves. That’s not a problem in and of itself; after all, that’s why they’re hiring. When they take their ignorance of such an expansive array of subjects and lump it under the heading of “computer stuff,” however, they do IT workers a grave disservice.

Like the employer who spouts off references to IT coding programs while conducting a job interview (you can tell I’m not knowledgeable in IT because I just used the phrase “coding programs” without even knowing if that’s the correct term), the hiring newspaper editor says the word “Youtube” as if it’s some 21st century “swordfish,” a code word that he can’t help but say in a dramatic winking tone.

Look at the opening lines of this Media Shift column:

“Multidisciplined” and “flexible” were just two of the words in a recent ad for a paid internship at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. The posting listed a whole series of multimedia skills as mandatory. There was no mention of traditional journalism attributes such as accuracy, good writing or ethics, perhaps because it goes without saying.

Does it really go without saying? At the risk of coming off as an old media curmudgeon myself — I assure you, I’m not — I think this new media movement has to some extent created this departure from realism. It’s fine that you want to embrace the multimedia landscape. I love, for instance, what the New York Times has been doing with its web presence. But you must also recognize that journalists and computer scientists are completely different people, and no matter how much you want a two-person mashup for the price of one, it’s rare you’ll find someone that is extremely good at both.

It’s the journalistic version of the myth of the computer guy. I understand that your newspaper revenues are dwindling. But don’t assume that you have to hire a guy who can throw a bunch of shit at the wall in the hope that he can make something stick. Despite Egon Spengler’s assertion in Ghost Busters, print is not dead yet.