The recent Lizzies – the annual IT Journalist awards – at Star City highlighted how diverse the art of journalism has become over recent years. For those not there, the range of recipients varied between newspapers, web sites, online radio stations and multimedia as well as magazines. (See www.mediaconnect.com.au).

Reaction was also wide varying as to how each of these media can compete with each other when in the main, the disciplines and skill sets needed for their individual creation are so different. Indeed, it reminded me of the early days of web site creation and trying to explain to a prospective client that yes, although it looked the same as a page from a magazine, the way of doing it had no similarity at all, if you take web vs print as an example.

Many know I have a strong propensity for print; some may say an over enthusiasm, especially of late. But prior to my major involvement in print via magazines and newsprint, my background was in video, especially television and training. Following that, I was heavily involved as a web developer for nearly ten years, a pioneer even. And then there was all that time in commercial radio with Triple M, 2GB and Radio Northern Beaches and time in promotions for CBS records.

So with this diverse electronic background, why do I think paper is still the most important?

There are three very good reasons in my view. And these involve both the customer and vendor viewpoint.

1. If electronic reading is so good, why do the general public despair the loss of paper manuals in favour of PDFs?
2. How do you get an advertiser to pay the same amount as they would for a full page ad in a magazine? Without advertisers, any commercial entity will die.
3. Mr Packer and Mr Murdoch (and Stokes to a degree) are far smarter than me. I don’t see them abandoning print any time soon.

There are others of course of less import; do we substitute the good ol’ dunny magazine rack with a holder for CDs or SD cards and have a reader on standby? How do you tear a page out at the doctor’s surgery? And how far can the paper boy throw an SD card anyway?

In truth, I think the happy medium, if you’ll pardon the pun, is one where the capacity of print, video, audio and web are combined in a synergistic way somehow. I don’t think anyone has really found it yet however. Again, it reminds me a little of the early days of the web when one person could get away doing it all as the technologies were pretty basic. Suddenly however, we needed to know a lot more with Flash, PHP, SQL, Web 2.0 and so on. The same has happened with skills now being necessary for audio, video, animation, compositing, delivery and more.

Next year’s Lizzies will be interesting to see what is done about categories, and who enters what, I suspect. I am even guessing cross entering may be possible if the categories are that widely split.

Which brings another point? Will the same happen to the Logies, the Oscars, the Emmys and similar with TV shows now online only, movies perhaps download only and so on?