The Backpack Journalist: Captain of all Trades

The clichéd, age old (haha) disparagement of journalism and journalists rings out from the armchairs of bitter men and women everywhere: “well even I could do that.” Backpack journalism and its “jack of all trades, master of none” reputation threatens to propagate this. Blogs and similar examples of citizen journalism apparently prove said disparagement. How do we combat this? It's not a question of skill specialization versus skill saturation.

Look at the journalism-public relationship like a carrier-passenger dynamic. Legitimate print journalism is an old helicopter… been flying around watchdogging and informing for years. Broadcast is a newer, prettier helicopter equipped with a few more goodies to cater to more people. The journalist is the pilot. If all the collective information worldwide is the atmosphere, the Internet is sucking up all of it, and now that old helicopter sputters in the thin air.  To make matters more threatening for the profession, citizens are driving faster and faster cars that get them to more and more places—meaning they can get a lot more news on their own—and so the ailing whirly bird above can become a nuisance

Backpack journalists learn how to drive submarines, fly jets, and maybe even drive environmentally-friendly buses, on top of being expert helicopter pilots. But they cannot survive or even subsist on the pure merit of dabbling in multiple crafts, they must take it to levels cars cannot go. A profession often lives and dies by its most glaring weaknesses…mediocre news by multi-tasking journalists are just helicopter pilots who keep trashing airplanes. Just learning the skill sets will not suffice. The BPJs need to excel, to use their education and resources to the utmost in order to discover, decipher, and something else that starts with D that means “to inform,” [in pursuit of the truth] in ways that everyone else cannot or will not. Air planes and helicopters are faster and more convenient, buses are safe and dependable, and submarines go to depths an automobile cannot ever hope to drive. A backpack journalist can manage them all, but for him(her) to try and take the Public with him, he must be excellent—he must be a captain. Mediocrity is not an option.

Let’s try this… Backpack journalists… “captain of all trades, master of one.” 

Perfect.