Teaching a young dog old tricks

Just weighing in on the ridiculous "you can't teach culture" posts popping up around the place.

Paul Conley kicks off with

"I'm urging employers not to offer any training in Web journalism."

I've trimmed the two reasons he posts for this:

"1. You cannot train someone to be part of a culture.
...An online journalist isn't a journalist who works online. He's a journalist who lives online. He's part of the Web.
It's a waste of time and money to teach multimedia skills and technology to someone who hasn't already become part of the Web.

2. When the fighting begins, the training must end.
As revenue shrinks, we can't spend money on training. We can't gather up the print folks and "prepare them as online journalists."

I completely disagree with his argument in general, but, in Paul's defence, he is writing about B2B press, an area I have no doubt he knows much better than I do. However, his post has been picked up and expanded upon.

Pat Thornton adds:

"Not every staff member can become an online or multimedia journalist.

And if they aren’t really great in their traditional media role, they probably don’t have a long-term role in your news organization. That’s the sad reality, but it’s the only way for newspapers to evolve.

You can’t teach culture."

I know dictionaries might be considered a dead-tree, olde worlde way of checking information, but I suggest Pat looks up the meaning of the word "culture". If paper offends thee, or you suffer from pulpuslacerataphobia, you could even try dictionary.com.

Try an analogy: an immigrant comes to your country -- they want to work, they have the right to work, they have an as yet unknown contribution to make. But they are turned back at the border because, despite their willingness to learn the language, the customs and the skills, they are informed "Sorry mate, but you can't learn culture".

Pat goes on:

"I think Conley would agree with me that the kind of training we can never offer is how to be an online journalist. We can only offer people with online skills the opportunity to learn more skills. You know CSS, well it’s time to learn javascript/Ajax. That sort of thing."

So, essentially, experience, contacts, even raw ability with language or images, count for nothing? This argument smacks of the "come back when you've got some experience, son" but in reverse.

I might be missing a trick here, but few of the journalists I know have the slightest notion how a printing press works, or how to repair a distribution van after a breakdown, or how to work out a newsagent's returns. And yet they managed to churn out pretty good, old-school, dead-tree journalism.

The blogosphere can't have it both ways -- either journalism is independent of platform (and therefore the skills are independent of platform) or they are not. Journalism happens between the brain and the pen (or the typewriter/word processor/blogging software/CMS) not once the text hits your RSS feed or website -- that is distribution.

What is important about what you read, listen to or watch online? Is it the background software applications that enable it to reach your screen? Or is it the content? That content does not come from programming knowledge. That content is generated by inquiring, skeptical minds who have the perseverance, the contacts and the sheer will to wring a story from what seems like thin air.

When those minds meet -- that's culture. And journalists, as a body, decide what their culture is -- the web will transform, inform and, I honestly believe, improve the content generated by that culture, but it should not dictate which minds will or will not be allowed to join the club.