The world of journalism has been in a state of change in the last decade with new technology that has made finding information and reporting easier. It is a lot different from the times when print journalism was king of the news world, and Chris Dufresne will be one of the first to let you know. As a sports journalist for the L.A. Times for the past 28 years, Dufresne has witnessed this change, and has embraced it. He uses Twitter to share his online stories and columns to his readers/followers. In this Q&A, Chris describes what it is like to be a journalist in today’s world.
Q: What is your take on the blogging world? Some journalists say it is reporting without doing the actual reporting.
A: Well, it can be that, or it can be reporting. It’s whatever the person that’s blogging wants to make out of it. The problem comes when the people who are not journalists or not practicing journalism are blogging and they’re not playing by the same rules. Some of those rules being attribution or backing your statements with facts. But, there are plenty of reputable blogs, like the Huffington Post, where there is real reporting going on. It’s up to the reader to distinguish between someone’s personal blog and what is actually real journalism.
Q: How often do you use mobile media such as the iPhone for your work?
A: I use it a lot. I’ve been in print for twenty-eight years, but I recognized the value of multimedia. It’s actually given me a lot of freedom because the print product is sort of restraining in that you only get a certain amount of space and it only comes out once a day. What I can use my Twitter account for is to link to my L.A. Times stories. It’s directing traffic to get more people to our website.
Q: Are there any aspects of your writing that have changed with the introduction of mobile media?
A: Yes. If you have an idea on something that they don’t have room for in the paper, but you have an opinion on it, you can just throw it out there. There were all of those years I had to hold a lot of stuff back because there was no medium for it. Now there is a medium, and it’s kind of liberating. I’m having a lot more fun expressing my personality. For people who are established writers, they’re using multimedia to enhance their reputation.
Q: At the L.A. Times, you have worked with some of the best news writers in the national media. How many of them have embraced online tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, and other social websites? For what reasons?
A: With us it’s kind of cut down the line. There are some people that don’t do it at all, but there are people like me who do embrace it. Some of the older journalists probably wonder ‘what good is it going to do me? In five years, by the time I figure it out I’ll be retired anyway.’ I understand that, but if you’re a younger journalist and you’re not on board with the new technology, then you’re probably not going to survive.
Q: As an online journalist, which websites and tools do you find to be the most helpful?
A: I’m an Internet junkie. When you cover a sport like I do in college football, you can go to every school's website, and you can get almost everything you need. When I first started I had to call the schools and do a lot of legwork to get information.
Q: How does the journalism world compare now from fifteen years ago aside from all of the technology that has been incorporated?
A: For our paper, it’s changed dramatically in what kind of stories we’ve been doing. I could go out and do a story that would take three weeks to write, and no one would think twice about it. It was a wider range of journalism back then. Now, it seems that everything is short, quick, and snappy. Before, you could only express your opinion if you were a columnist. Now, they want your opinion on everything.
Q: Do you think the next generation of journalists will have it easier or harder trying to make a living? Why?
A: That’s the great unknown. How do you sustain a business model in this Wild West frontier of multimedia? It’s going to be different, but people are going to want printable news. What we’re going through is parallel to what the music industry is going through. People don’t go to record stores anymore, they just download it online. There’s got to be a way to monetize the business. People should be willing to pay for quality information, and right now the great unknown is whether they’ll do it or not.
Chris Dufresne, L.A. Times, Twitter, Huffington Post, College Football websites
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