Re: Doing more with less. I think there’s also a difference between being forced to do more with less and desiring to do more on any terms. My friend mentions that a lot of younger journalists are being thrown into video and other online specialties, but a lot of younger folks are also seeking it out. It’s a growth area, and I think a lot of entry-level people are taking advantage of it to build their careers. At the places I worked when I was a full-time journalist, the Internet was always wide open, and the online division would immediately post anything you wrote, whereas the evening news program or the magazine always had a much higher barrier to entry. I have a number of other friends who’ve recently graduated J-school, and most of them have said that the people who are being churned out now by Berkeley, Columbia, Mizzoo, and all the rest are pretty comfortable with, if not excited by, the prospect of diversifying their media skills, doing what they do with the Internet in mind.

I worked in television awhile, interned in TV news, and finally went to work for a magazine, before jumping ship to go back to school. I was always a lowly fly on the wall, but in my humble opinion, each has a very different workstyle. It’d be tough to shoot a Nightline-style interview while working on a print story. But what’s interesting to me is that people are probably coming to expect a different aesthetic from newspapers than from ABC News. And, between YouTube and The Amazing Race, people are taking a much kinder view of even shaky video these days.

Is it ideal having wordsmiths doing double-duty as videosmiths? Probably not, but I think we’re entering a time when we all have to do more with less.