We had an intern at the radio station last week, a strapping young, overconfident 19 year old who expects to set the world on fire and become a TV foreign correspondent, irrespective of the fact that every broadcast outlet in the world is closing bureaus, he speaks no language but English and seemed to me to be remarkably incurious about the world around him. (come to think of it, those characteristics will set him up quite nicely for a career at Fox news...)
He nearly made me cry, this kid.
As we were going over some of the basics in our newsroom the first day, he asked me what computer program I had used when I attended Fanshawe college.
Uh, we, um, didn't.
As I began my journalism career, we in radio, big and small, were still cutting tape, actual magnetic tape, on reel-to-reel machines. Some stations were using computer programs for their music, but the news was still strictly reel to reel and carts. If there were a piece of sound we wanted rid of in a clip or interview, we literally chopped it out, sticking the remaining pieces back together with tape. On very fancy machines, there might be a special 45-degree cutter to get the splices just right. You had done a good job if you couldn't hear the splices.
These days, I sometimes complain about the fact that I do the jobs that would have been held by three or even four people 'back in the day', (newsrun, co-host and produce/host a talk show) but it dawns on me that technology has advanced to such an awesome degree in a mere 15 years, those of us with decent organisational skills really can do the jobs that used to require three people. For example, where it used to take perhaps as much as three minutes to locate and edit a clip for a newscast and then move it to the cart from which it would play during the news, now, that same work is done with two clicks of a mouse and the time it takes to type out the title. Three to five minutes minutes versus fifteen to twenty seconds. That's a lot of time saved in just over a decade.
So why does it feel as though we've made the leap from dinosaurs to manned flight, and I'm the dinosaur?
No comments:
Post a Comment
These comments are moderated cuz I hate trolls and sealions. And, this should really go without saying, but please think twice and be nice when commenting.