Mental Flexibiity

Last Sunday's New York Times Magazine had an interesting piece by Virginia Heffernan about the changing nature of media content--something we wordsmiths ponder when publishing houses seem to be dying before our eyes.

And that, of course, is Heffernan's point--that by the time we archaic journalistic types recognize that newspapers and magazines are going to become cultural artifacts like 8-track tape players and video and audio cassettes--it it too late to reinvent ourselves. "For ten years journalists have hoped to avoid radical job retraining. And who can blame anyone in any profession, mid-career and set in her ways, for avoiding seminars on writing Google-friendly leads or opening her sources to readers?" writes Heffernan.

Aha, but while we we were further entrenching ourselves in the craft of creating sentences that fewer and fewer people read, the next generation of our profession was blogging, twittering and facebooking themselves into social media proficiency--although someone is going to still have to convince me that all this constant keeping tabs on everybody and everything is somehow related to work or better yet, getting more work.

The bigger threat, however, according to Heffernan, is when advertisers--the very beings who make the existence of newspapers and magazines possible in the first place--become content providers. Poof--the middle man--the article writer--disappears because you can get your content at the source. Why would anyone buy a "women's magazine" to read about budget conscious meals that were organic if you can simply find them on a Whole Foods web site? Better yet, why would anyone read about anything in a women's magazine (health tips, beauty suggestions, fashion advice) if you can get the same info on the respective sites without paying for it.

So what to do? Write for web sites perhaps, but more importantly, at least according to Heffernan, demonstrate "mental flexibility" to explore new media and figure out how to make it work for you.