If you want to employ a proper journalist rather than a cheap web monkey, the SEO stuff really is secondary.

Now, I know talk about the divide between print and online/digital journalists has been discussed over and over again since … well … since the internet came about. So it’s been quite a few years. Yet comments like the above are still held in newsrooms today.

Kevin Anderson (who I was very fortunate to meet at Digital Directions this year) has written on this particular issue in his latest blog post — and he has one piece of advice for digital journalists subject to such treatment in the newsroom:

If you’re in a poisonous work environment like this, constantly having to defend your work, just leave. It’s a judgement call, and every place has its politics, but if you’re sidelined, marginalised and disrespected, you owe it yourself and to journalism to take your skills where they’ll be put to good use.

As Riyaad Minty, Al Jazeera’s head of social media, said at Digital Directions, there is no old or new media, just media. He was, of course, talking about Al Jazeera’s coverage of the ongoing protests in the Middle East and North Africa, and how the photos, videos and informations shared by protesters in these countries played a central role in helping to tell the story about what was happening on the ground.

You can read Anderson’s blog posts on the “cheap web monkey” comment here and here.

As a side note, I’m not sure why some journalists are so exclusionary about their industry, as Adam Tinworth (whom Anderson cites) notes, but I would argue that they should be more inclusive instead. In the past week, the media has been scrambling to understand how a nuclear power plant works, and then explain the risks of a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi facility. Such coverage would have been severely handicapped without the fantastic graphics/interactives/multimedia put together for online, print and broadcast illustrating the design of the reactors.

So is it fair to say that journalists = only reporters? Photographers, editors, sub-editors, copy editors, layout subs, designers, producers etc — they all work in, and for, the newsroom. Their work helps a news organisation tell a story well. So why exclude them?

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