There’s been a lot of talk recently about the future of journalism, and my job places me amid stimulating conversation while conveniently providing me with lots of pondering time as I complete repetitive tasks.

I figured it was time to wholeheartedly throw my fedora into the ring. I’m tired of hearing certain assumptions tossed around with no factual basis. I’d like to think journalists would know better. These assumptions also tend to ignore the fundamentals of journalism: Serve the community by providing useful and understandable information. Here are some of the ones bothering me:

1. There are web people and there are print people. These groups do not overlap.

2. Young people only care about the internet and think newspapers are lame.

3. Young journalists only care about the internet.
OR
Young journalists are conservative and nostalgic.

Read on for a much longer explanation.

1. There are web people and there are print people. These groups do not overlap.

I heard this at a staff meeting this week and I’ve heard it from good friends (who are also good journalists, for the most part). This idea makes no sense at all. If it did, there would be no point for the relentless web teasers most newspaper embed in their print editions: “Extra stuff online!” “See the video at blahblahblah.com.” “See more photos at our website.”

I read newspapers both in print and online. A lot of days I scan the headlines of the print paper before I go to work, read all the stories online at work, then open the print edition to read the comics and other bits that are just more enjoyable in print. And yes, I know I’m not an average consumer since I’m a journalist and more news-oriented than many of my peers. And yes, so are many of the other people I know who read both print and online. But there you already have a number of exceptions to this assumption, and isn’t it kind of elitist to assume we’re so different from everyone else? My mom reads newspapers online and in print. My grandma reads print and doesn’t usually care to read online, but will when it’s the only way to get that information (like when I was writing in Indianapolis).

This assumption also breeds futility, because it implies people don’t switch teams. You are a Print reader or a Web reader (are we snobby enough we want to say “consumer”?), and you will never change. If you are old you are doomed to be a Print reader and never know the glorious wonders of the web. If you are a Web reader you will never pay a nickel for anything isn’t constantly changing and customizable. That’s just insulting to everyone, and it’s disheartening to think there’s nothing we can do as journalists to get people interested in our work.

Good thing it’s not true. There are many older people who want to see videos, want to see the online extras, they just don’t know how. I talked to a woman the other day who is frustrated because she sees teasers for all this great stuff that’s online-only and she wants to know why we don’t want her to see it. I’ve sat in classes watching two students discussing a NYT story they’re reading; one is reading on a laptop and the other picked up a copy of the paper on the way to class. It’s not like they’re warring factions.

This assumption comes up when industry people are explaining why a website should be separate or distinguished from the print product in some way. This leads to another minor assumption, that readers need help figuring out that the web is different from print. The fear is that people won’t realize the website has So Much More to Offer! unless we differentiate them. Wait, the web has more? Oh really? Is that what the proliferation of printed teasers is for? That’s just the newest reincarnation of the old newsroom assumption that readers are complete morons. Unless they’ve been reading too much Harry Potter, most people know newspapers will never present video in print. Savvy consumers will come to expect video from newspapers anyway – and know where to find it. The ideological battle is not to convince people the web offers more than print, but to convince them newspapers offer more than print.

2. Young people only care about the internet and think newspapers are lame.

This is the other assumption used to explain why a newspaper’s website must be differentiated from the print product. Again, I don’t even know where this comes from. Why would young people think newspapers are “uncool”? Newspapers are not going to be the Next Big Thing, but that’s not the objective anyway. A newspaper should try to be like toothpaste; people should just assume they need it.

More so than previous generations, young people need to know the difference of a reliable source vs. a dubious one. So they do. They understand the nuances of Wikipedia, and they realize BoingBoing and Something Awful and Facebook News Feed are not the same as a legitimate news source. The people who get their news via MySpace were not going to grow up to be loyal newspaper readers even before the internet came along.

The only truth to this is that young people do think paying for newspapers is lame. This outrages older people. “How dare they?! Spoiled little brats, we’ll make them pay!” Yeah, that’ll work. They shut down Napster, but it took a simple, hassle-free interface like iTunes before anyone even considered paying for music online. Newspapers better think likewise, or else just remember how the penny press was the best thing that ever happened to journalism and get over it.

3. Young journalists only care about the internet.
OR
Young journalists are conservative and nostalgic.

This is a continuation of the previous assumption, from inside the newsroom. It’s basically two sides of the same assumption and first of all, either could be true depending on which young people formed your stereotypes.

Young people are like all other people in that they come in a variety of intelligence levels. You’ll always get a few stupid ones and we might as well disregard them here because they’ll hopefully switch industries soon anyway.

Addressing the technophiliac extreme, young people are the least likely to forget about older readers because from their perspective everyone is old. They’d have to forget about everyone, and as much as we hear about self-centered young people, most people who choose journalism as their career have grown out of it by then.

Worse are the middle-aged newsroom people who forget many of their peers don’t keep up with technology the way they do. Many middle-aged managers are more confident in moving to the web, more comprehensively and more quickly, because they forget there are plenty of people their own age who never had a need for the internet and aren’t ready for it. In my experience you hear the “Let them read the obit page!” rhetoric more from older folks in the newsroom who’ve made a career-long effort to keep up with technology and in doing so forgot not everyone is like them.

From another angle, I know a lot of young journalists who learned on print design and still love it, while also learning how it translates and adapts to the web. Photographers are naturally the same way.

Now for the other end of the spectrum: Sure there are lots of young journalists who are nostalgic for the old-timey culture of journalism. It’s kitschy and fun, and only natural when everything about the future apparently sucks. If anything it’s a yearning for a time when a cub reporter with good clips could actually get a decent job instead of getting laid off. There’s no reason to be opposed to innovation when it’s basically the only chance you have for job security ever.

There’s some truth to this. I was shocked last summer to meet a few very talented journalists straight out of college who considered themselves Writers in the most serious way possible. The kind of people who say, “There will always be a place for good writing and I have no interest in video or multimedia.” Oh, how nice! How idealistic and shortsighted!
But let’s give these misguided preservers of the industry benefit of the doubt and assume they’re just generic-brand stubborn, the same kind of people who said they’d never join Facebook. They’ll either convert or create less job competition for me, so it’s win-win.

The only reason sane, realistic young journalists balk at change in the industry is when owners, editors and other older people with control go ga-ga over stupid ideas, like citizen journalism or Twitter.