"You can't teach an old dog new tricks" is a saying that more-than-slightly reeks of ageism and may lie, unspoken, behind many "lettings go," jobforce-wide.
It might be more correct to say, "You can teach a seasoned dog new tricks, but he might not like 'em -- or at least the initial idea of them."
Part of the work in my capstone class - Media Management - includes tackling case studies, in which I play the role of news director in a specific scenario. I'm currently working on a case study, in which, among other issues, a TV newsroom is facing this nebulous concept called convergence. Veteran reporters are suddenly confronted by tasks they've never had to do before, such as writing their own Web stories and tweeting.
My job, as hypothetical news director, is to smoothly oversee this transition. In order to gain perspective, I spoke with one of the anchors at my station --
KOMU 8 TV --
Jim Riek. Jim has been in the TV industry since 1977 and has seen sweeping changes since he first hopped aboard.
Jim is on
Twitter, as are all of
KOMU's main news anchors, but he said he wasn't an early adopter. He signed up only after "peer pressure" from some folks in the newsroom. He tweets now - and I enjoy learning all I know about golf from those - but he said he has spoken with other people his age in the business, who expressed some frustration over the changes.
TV news now doesn't look very similar to how it did when Jim first got into it, he said. In the late 1970s, TV stations, newspapers and radio stations were three very distinct newsrooms. Now, as almost every journalists knows firsthand, the lines are much more blurred. In some cases, you can't even tell where one newsroom ends and the other begins, not to mention the addition of all things Web and digital in order to further disseminate content.
The one thing Jim said hasn't changed is the opportunity to meet people you wouldn't otherwise meet and do things you wouldn't otherwise do.
Jim is an incredible asset to KOMU -- not only in the stories he puts out (see my latest
favorite, about the remnants of nuclear missile launch sites that still lie all over Missouri!), but also in the mentorship he provides to so many of the students at University of Missouri-owned NBC affiliate KOMU 8, where the newsroom functions as both your typical NBC affiliate newsroom AND as a teaching lab.
But, as Jim mentioned, KOMU is unique for that reason. So what about other career journalists who have been in the business for decades and are now facing a whole new world of Web stories and Facebook?
Harking back to my case study, Jim recommended I - as "news director" - suggest to veteran reporters and anchors to give Twitter and other new media a shot. There's no harm in trying, really, and sometimes the first step is the hardest. As Jim said, he wasn't the first to jump on the Twitter wagon, but now that he has, he likes it.
Although not every seasoned TV journalist has college students to directly mentor, per se, many of them do have institutional knowledge and a finely-tuned ability to tell stories from which younger journalists can learn.
A young pup may come into the newsroom with tech savvy Twitter know-how, but a well-trained canine can help that pup learn to craft the stories that need to be tweeted about in the first place.
In with the new... mentored by the "old." And since experienced dogs can learn new tricks, too, and become quite good at them, then perhaps, in turn, the pup can help pave his mentor's way to the Web.
