We learn the rules so we can forget them

I wasn't sure what I was going to write this post about, but then it came to me.
"The reason we learn these rules is so we can forget them", I was told by a wise German yesterday.

I was attending a seminar by Wing Tsun grandmaster Sifu Gomo Keith Kernspecht in Dartford. The grandmaster said that we learn the forms (techniques) of Wing Tsun to teach us how to defend ourselves, but that the ultimate aim is for them to come naturally - or forget them.

The same is true about a lot of things in our lives. I am touch typing this - I have forgotten where the keys are, I just press them and make words. I have forgotten how to spell the words, they come naturally. And if I don't know a word, I look it up or learn its form. But once learnt it is forgotten.

So less of the mystic nonsense - what am I getting at? Well I work in journalism and websites. I am fairly well known for being innovative. I am also known as being a bit of a non-conformist.

I often get into conversations at work or with my peers that involve phrases like "well the system won't let us" or "we've traditionally never done it like that" - which drive me up the wall!

There are techniques and ways of doing things in journalism - short hand, the inverse triangle story system, who, when, where, what, why, and how etc. The same is true of the web SEO, optimisation of images, use of color (sic) and many more.

My points are these. If we are to truly progress towards Web 3 and true social systems of web-based information, as well as make money from the web for our bosses, we need to forget the lessons and techniques that got us here and keep on innovating.

We need to forget old models (Messrs James and Rupert Murdoch - it will never work) so we can find new models that are based upon, but not reliant upon our fixed learning.

Bloggers - of which I am one - need to remember that they are only doing the same thing that news forums were doing 20 years ago, but with better technology. I'm using Blogger that has a word processor comparable to Word of 10 years ago - and the future will just bring more.

But we mustn't get caught up in the hubris. Twitter will not always be the in web thing - something else will come along. As blogging will be replaced by something else and subs barriers and pay walls and old-school web payment models will be replaced by something else.

As grandmaster Kernspecht said: "20 years ago I would have told you to do this and there are so-called experts who still talk about it as if it is the only way of doing things. I have moved on and they are fools if they do not".

Welcome to 21st century news

Writer, web head, blogger, film maker, journalist, broadcaster, photographer, SEO expert, techie, geek and more. What are journalists supposed to be in this day and age?

When I was born, in 1972 – a Pisces and the year of the rat (thanks Blogger) – my father listed his profession on my birth certificate as computer engineer.

The same year, (according to Wikipedia) Nixon went to China and ordered the space shuttle program to begin. The bloody Sunday massacre took place and the Godfather is released. The Watergate scandal takes place, leading Nixon to step down and the Munich Massacre takes place. Oh and the Vietnam war was still raging.

1972 it seems made the early 21st century's War on Terror seem a little lame, with a bomb going off almost every week – and in Europe too. And I was raised in the cold war. I genuinely believed that the world could be annihilated at any second by the USSR – something most people today find completely unreal. When the Wind Blows was a potential reality form me.
So what's this got to do with information businesses and journalism?

Well, even though computers at the time filled large rooms and mostly still used punch cards or very big hard disks, the global information age was being born.

The space shuttle development program led to a boom in communication satellites (either to spy on those tricky Ruskies or send radio or TV signals).

Vietnam, Watergate, Bloody Sunday and the Olympic massacre were stories carried around the world and almost as they happened.

These days, despite the massive amounts (quantity?) of computing power we throw at organising the world, there is still terrorism, still wars raging that America can't win and still some good quality journalism.

However, the advent of 24 hour rolling news has done two things.

The first is (perceptibly at least) that wars seem less real and, if anything, further away. In fact, the special effects in movies and the quality of computer graphics means there is very little difference on screen between the real wars and the fake.

Are we suffering from information overload? I don't know, but some times I think less news is better than more.

But as a journalist in the 21st century I can't think that for too long. Oh no. Like Woolworths, if we don't change we die. My former colleague Retail Week editor Tim Danaher writes in his blog that the nostalgia for Woolworths of the past is a dangerous thing. And so is the nostalgia for the good old days of journalism, which brings me to my second point.

Journalism needs to adapt to survive and journalists need to to change to. As my comrades in the Nation Union of Journalists are discovering, journalism and the media can no longer be defined by sector – newspapers, TV, magazines the internet (small i because you don't cap the T in telephone).

Instead, journalists can at any time be called upon to be writers, film makers, editors, bloggers, champions of SEO etc, because the perception is that their readers demand it.

And I truly believe that unless business to business journalists accept this they will all be out of a job. There, I've said it.

The news editor of a certain weekly retail magazine said to me years ago about podcasting: "If we start recording podcasts and putting them online, won't we be a radio station."
The answer is yes and a TV station and a web site and, sometimes, just a writer on a well-written, well-designed and well-subbed weekly business to business magazine.
Bring it on I say.