I’ve seen plenty of programmers and designers parachute into a newsroom with a mandate to do whatever they want with the site. For every Holovaty, there are plenty of disastrous experiments.

That doesn’t mean the paper shouldn’t take the risk, but students shouldn’t think picking up a few programming skills should warrant automatic hiring in a newsroom.

Newspapers say they want to find the next Holovaty, and then they send a clueless idiot to interview the students at a job fair. Doh!

This entry comments on Alan Mutter’s blog entry titled “Brain Drain,” and provides my perspective about how newspapers aren’t taking advantage of young, technologically savvy employees who are leaving the industry for other jobs….

As Howard attests, a lot of this is going to vary from paper to paper. I had a great experience in Roanoke, but even there I felt a pang of pushback.

I’ve lectured to several university classes where students are adamant they learn the “print” way of doing journalism. This despite what the market actually demands (online).

Much of this, like Nick points out, is due to how journalism is being taught. Hopefully, schools will collect more professors such as yourself that push a progressive agenda.

Everyone’s looking for a way to save journalism. I think one of the necessary steps is to give more power to our youngest journalists — but not the ones who only want to write, who dream of bringing back a time now gone, when print was king of the hill.

Editors need to find the young journalists like Meranda — and not the other kind — and give them the reins. Not all day, every day. But let them drive, with supervision.

It’s a big piece of what we need now.

I do feel very fortunate for the opportunities I have been given here. I just wish I had more of the opportunities I really want, the things I personally think would be really cool and would work, as well as some chances at shooting video — which I’m still not doing even though I should be by now.

To be honest, I know my chances to dabble at this paper are better than they would be at most, both with online, such as the micro-site and the fact that within a month of arriving I was posting stories to the Web unsupervised, but especially off, where I’ve never had a story idea flat out rejected and where working on enterprise isn’t just a dream it’s an expectation (but again, without additional hours to squeeze it in beyond my often-overwhelming daily grind, which I think was what was meant by my plate already being full). For my complaints, I really think the blog was the first thing I’ve ever personally been told no to, and even that wasn’t an adamant, don’t ever bring it back up, definitive “absolutely not.” It felt more like a, “I don’t think you’re ready for more responsibility because we’ve already piled you with plenty of other things to get accomplished.” Which is true, I am always swamped with more work than is probably realistic and I have a tendency to not know my limits.

The fortunate thing is unlike many of the comments on the Newsosaur and even my post, I’m not at a paper where simply copying and pasting is good enough. They are pushing for more online in various realms. I’m just not getting to be as big a part of it as I’d like. And that is what frustrates me because that’s where my interests lie.

The thing I also realize, and don’t think I made the point clearly in my post, is that I don’t blame my company or bosses. I feel I am responsible for my own destiny. The reality is, I am doing what I was hired to do. So in light of the fact that I now know I need to prove to my editor I can clear my plate and leave room for dessert (the blog, video, etc.), I’m just going to have to work harder to make that known.

On the other hand — the students who seek out the online journalism classes and get really enthusiastic about them? Those are the students who often feel horribly disillusioned after just one internship. What is their complaint? “All they let me do was copy and paste.”

Some of them abandon journalism because of their internship experiences. It’s not that they think the monkey work is beneath them, but rather that thy have all these great skills and no chance to put them to use.

The gray hairs are usually the most enthusiastic and ready to try something new.