My Professional Experience

 


I'd like to take credit for accumulating what seems to be the right amount of experience in the right areas leading up to where I am today. That wouldn't give credit to the large slice of luck I have had along the way, help from friends, and the respect I have been granted over the years by those with whom I have worked.

Frankly speaking, I have enjoyed the collaborations, whether in gathering the right sources to break a story on deadline at the Savannah Morning News, or working with an art director to put the prefect bon mot to a print ad. Working with individuals who enjoy their craft as much as I do has always been a bonus. That most shared my overriding interest in the accomplishment over the parsing out of credit has been a joy.

In recent years, I have found web work to be more solitary. (That is, with the exception of Orion -- a singularly non-solitary exploit.) In addition to my web work, academics have become central to my life, and I can underscore that laboring in those vineyards is indeed lonely work. I have hopes that the opportunities to work with others in academia will increase in the future. It's an odd thing, you know, that by the time you finish working on the degree, you find that you've so narrowly crafted your interests that nearly no one else is the least interested in them. (And who can blame them.)

Finally, a more somber key. I've noted over the past 23 years of being paid to write, that the craft has fallen, it seems, in value. I first noticed this in advertising copy. No one wanted those wonderfully Ogilvy-estque stories. They didn't even want a Bernbach phrase. Bullet points! Given they were paying exactly the same per project, it was easy to accept this. But I miss telling a story.

This especially in the case of web work: the pretty pictures and dazzling tricks at times seem to overwhelm the content. We live in a world that pays lip service to valued information (a.k.a., knowledge), rarely slowing down long enough to read it. At times, I have been guilty of this myself, rushing from reading one bit of e-mail to updating a webpage to taking care of some other seemingly very important task.

Combine this frenetic thrashing about with the instantaneous quality of the net, and you have, I think, a sort of cultural blender cum temporal morph, capable of both quickly reducing anything substantial to an "easy-to-drink meal" that can be changed at a moment's notice. That is, we are placing so much emphasis on the web as a source of knowledge, but failing to note that the web contains no permanent history, no lasting record, and that it's only people who create knowledge. Editions are ephemeral. Publishing is at once easy, democratic and valueless.

Should we be surprised then, that some netizens fail to appreciate the value of putting time and effort into a thing when that thing can always be modified or deleted at a click of a button? This is the same logic that eliminated the need for basic math on the grounds that handheld calculators would always be available to manage such mundane functions, such as thinking.

The situation reminds me of the undergraduate who handed his professor a list of books the undergraduate had checked out of the library, as if it offered proof that the books had been read. I hope that after we've all gotten over the cute coding and irritating animations, we could return to a concern for content, and with it, a concern for writing and reading. That is, Mass Communications.

My Life in Journalism

Advertising

The Net

 


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Page Last Updated 9/4/99
Copyright 1999 Thomas Gould
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