I feel I am cutting my own throat
MATHEW HULBERT (letters, January) paints a rosy picture of multimedia, at least in radio.
No-one objects to new technology. Indeed, I like to think as a working hack that learning to use a computer keyboard in the 1980s was progress from bashing out stories on a typewriter. That innovation made my job easier and more efficient.
What reporters object to, especially in the lower levels of the print trade where staff levels are dreadful, is having extra tasks and skills demanded of them without any degree of consultation or extra payment.
As we all know, news reporters now write for the internet and are being asked to make time-consuming videos (video work of course being totally beyond the remit of their original contracts).
No extra staff are employed for this; indeed at my newspaper (employing only one full-time senior) they took away one reporter to work at a so-called flagship in the group. It is this arrogant assumption that directors can squeeze extra output and skills from staff without extra pay that so annoys staff and demoralises them.
As I pointed out to my understanding acting editor recently, it would be a shame if competent and hard-working print journalists received an adverse work appraisal for making crap videos — a skill they neither seek nor need have any aptitude for, or they would have headed for television.
Personally, as a confessed print junkie, watching our best newspaper stories given away free on the internet while paper sales decline I feel like a man slowly drawing a knife across his own throat.
But I am doing my best to stop being an old reactionary and think instead of the huge riches that await us (well, the shareholders) from internet ad sales and showing videos that hardly any members of the public will bother to watch and run the danger of being nothing but a movie version of vanity publishing.