I bought my then state-of-the art SONY Micro MV camcorder approximately 15 years ago.  I had a difficult time choosing between it and a cheaper, bigger camcorder, that would have produced higher quality video.  In the end I decided to pay the premium to get the smaller camera and sacrifice some video quality, because I reasoned if it wasn’t small enough to take with me, I wouldn’t use it.   It came with a sleek “one hour” battery, which really lasted closer to 45 minutes.  Early on I replaced the original with the larger “two hour” battery (pictured above),  loosing some sleekness, but providing enough energy to last through my kids’ school events.  It was a great video recorder for its time, and served me well for about 8 years.  In the end its final fatal flaws were its use of proprietary hardware (Micro MV tape cassettes that SONY stopped making and selling in the US market) and software (SONY never upgraded it so it only worked on Windows operating systems circa the year 2000).

As I thought about the tradeoffs I faced and the choices that I made in selecting my camcorder, I was struck by the thought that many of the changes which have occurred in the journalism business were caused by similar consumer choices. Over the past decade, consumers have consistently chosen speed, convenience, and ease of use over quality. Mobile phone voice quality is still significantly inferior to landline voice quality, but your mobile phone is always with you wherever you go.  Traditional journalism produced high quality newspaper and magazine content, but today it’s much more convenient to retrieve news from your smartphone.  It’s there with you when you want it, and it even offers current, up-to-the-minute news updates.  There’s no need to wait for tomorrow’s newspaper or next week’s magazine to receive these.  The number of grammar and other mistakes has accelerated as well, but it’s more important to publish something quickly (on the internet) than to spend extra timing honing the quality.

As I read my text books written by journalists, I sometimes get the feeling that in spite of all the attention paid to acquiring the skills of the new age digital journalist, there is still a certain pining for the good old days of journalism.  I think it’s safe to say the good old days aren’t coming back and maybe weren’t as good as remembered in many cases.  Yes there are more mistakes made in the rush to get news out the door today, but they’re also corrected easier and faster (e.g., remember the famous “Dewy defeats Truman” newspaper headline?)  Yes, we have to consider the source of our news and perform more of our own “fact checking” nowadays, but news never was totally unbiased.  So, yes, I loved my SONY Micro MV camcorder and it was a great system for its time, but I wouldn’t trade my current iPhone for it.  In the same way, I loved the old style journalism represented by my daily newspaper, but I wouldn’t trade it for getting the news off my iPhone in real-time, even if it comes with a few grammar errors thrown in.