Tres generaciones perdidas

Me entero por esta columna de Vicente Lozano en El Mundo de Madrid de la aparición de Journalism’s Lost Generation: The Un-doing of U.S. Newspaper Newsrooms, de Scott Reinardy, profesor de periodismo en la Universidad de Kansas. El libro es una colección de entrevistas a periodistas de redacciones norteamericanas, realizadas durante su año sabático en 2014. Aquí una entrevista sobre sus hallazgos que publica hoy la Columbia Journalism Review.

Les paso, editadas, las tres generaciones perdidas que cita Lozano, tal como las describe Reinardy en la entrevista:

1. One are certainly those who lost their job and perhaps their profession in the layoffs and the cuts. 

2. The second, I think, are the older journalists. The culture has changed so drastically and the workload—the way newspapers cut their staff but continue to try to produce at the same rate they previously had. And then adding in the technology: “We want you to shoot videos or take photos or post online.” And the social media aspects: “You’ve got to tweet X amount per day, you have to blog X amount.” That culture has changed dramatically, so the older generation is feeling, certainly, some loss. 

3. And then the younger generation is coming in and not really sure of the direction or the culture of the newspaper; they’re trying to figure it out. They come in with different perspectives. They can handle the multimedia and the social media, but then we have to talk about quality and depth of reporting. Are they just being driven to get more clicks and not worried about doing that second or third or fourth interview to make the content better? I’m not sure. And I’m not sure that generation—in talking with people—they’re not getting a lot of guidance from the older generation because the older generation is just too darned busy to instill some of the qualities and the mission that had previously been established.

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So you have several generations that are trying to find their ways, and it’s challenging. And you have a gap in there as well. There are journalists between 35 and 45 who are leaving the profession—primarily women. There’s a generation gap that certainly changes the dimension of what the newsroom looks like and what the news looks like, quite frankly.