Necessity of Web monkey work
Lucas Grindley says cut-and-paste work in online newsrooms is important:
Tomorrow morning I’ll be waking up just before 4:30 a.m. to do some of that monkey work. And I contend it is legitimate journalism.
He’s right — headline writing, writing good summaries (to lure people into stories) and making sure all the story elements “are presented in a professional and usable way” are very important.
This link comes by way of Journalistopia, where a lively discussion earlier covered Web monkey jobs in journalism.
By the way, my 2004 edition of the AP Stylebook has these entries: Web, World Wide Web (but webcam, webcast, webmaster), Internet and online (no hyphen). There is no entry for Net.
Technorati tags: journalism | online media | interactivity | training | multimedia | jobs
Just for the record, I didn’t mean to imply it isn’t important, or at least required to be done well when done — just that in this day and age, it should be unnecessary. No newspaper should still be doing nightly updates to their web site. By the time traditional night update time rolls around, all the content should already be up, because the newsroom has been publishing throughout the day.
December 1, 2006 at 2:42 am