Reporter's Notebook: With today's technology, you're either a generalist or you're unemployed. Thus, exotic new creatures such as "preditors" can be found at the NAB Post Plus show.Once upon a time, all media professionals were specialists; editors only edited, lighting specialists only did lights, camera operators only knew about cameras.
Today, technology has made everyone either a generalist or unemployed.
Attendees at the NAB Post Plus show this week are seeing how that situation creates new challenges for media organizations and even greater challenges for media professionals, many of whom have been in the business for decades.
What's the biggest challenge for broadcast veterans? "Their experience," says Douglas Spotted Eagle, Emmy Award-winner and Managing Producer of VASST, one of the leading new media training organizations. "They have a lot of preconceived notions about things that really aren't relevant."
As an example, he cites the disdain that many experienced broadcast professionals feel toward compressed video. "These are the same people who in 1996 were saying 'DV [digital video] will never make it on the air' but now they're shooting DV every day."
Adjusting to new ways of working can also get tricky.
"A lot of the guys who came up in the broadcast world are so used to the world of linear editing that they're having a really tough time wrapping their brain around a non-linear workflow."
Spotted Eagle feels that the entire mindset of media professionals is rapidly changing. "We have a new paradigm in the broadcast world today, that is the 'preditor,' or the producer/editor … the guy who is willing to not only come up with a story and execute the story, but he's willing to edit the story and take it the next mile."
When a single person can execute all aspects of a story, it changes their entire approach to the story. "Because of his desire to be a 'preditor' he tends to be a bit more creative and he'll take the story to the Nth degree … they're not specialists; they're writers, they're shooters, they're producers, they're editors."
The old-media specialists who seem to adjust best are editors. "Editors make the best transition to producers, cameramen, writers … editors make adjustments better than anybody else," most likely because they've been in the middle of the production process for so long that they've seen what works and what doesn't.
Ben Kozuch, president and co-founder of Future Media Concepts, another prominent media training firm, also sees dramatic changes in the skills needed by today's media professional.
"The biggest trend that I've seen is the convergence of professions," he said. "Ten years ago people walked around with a business card that said 'offline editor.' That profession is gone. Then in the nineties, the editor and the special effects person merged into one. Perhaps not at the movie production level, but in corporate video and documentaries, in independent and industrial films, the editor and the special effects person are no longer separate."
Kozuch prefers to use the term "digital artist" to describe the more global skills that a production career now requires.
"Now this creature, the digital artist, needs to know a thing or two about compression, Web delivery, DVD authoring and so on."
Kozuch added that the need for training is not limited to the newcomer. "You need to expand your skills all the time." For those who do keep their skills up-to-date, he sees enormous new opportunities.
"If I were to choose a career direction which is the most lucrative, I would like to become an expert in producing corporate media … It encompasses the entire range of skills, but if you master those skills you're in a very desirable spot."
Online Media 
