I’m not sure if this is a good sign or not – in a Washington Post article about hyper-local journalism, they look at reporters down in Ft. Myers, Fla., who have no desks or offices to go to – they apparently just tool around in their cars, finding and filing stories all day from their laptops, with digital audio recorders and video cams to provide multimedia support.
one of its fleet of mobile journalists, or “mojos.” The mojos have
high-tech tools — ThinkPads, digital audio recorders, digital still
and video cameras — but no desk, no chair, no nameplate, no land line,
no office. They spend their time on the road looking for stories,
filing several a day for the newspaper’s Web site, and often for the
print edition, too. Their guiding principle: A constantly updated
stream of intensely local, fresh Web content — regardless of its
traditional news value — is key to building online and newspaper
readership.
As I’ve said earlier, the media is looking more and more like the future that K.W. Jeter envisioned, when each one of us is some kind of permanently on-duty freelancer. But the cynic in me looks at this deconstruction of the newsroom and wonders if somewhere the corporate bean-counters aren’t chuckling dryly and re-working their spreadsheets to figure out the cost of office space…
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