Fall 2005 PDF - Milton Academy

Jesse Sarles ’93“It’s a flexible medium, and with the right level ofcommitment a Web site can become the ultimateauthority for any particular news story.”The Web Journalistcbs4denver.comJesse Sarles ’93 manages and maintainscbs4denver.com, the Web site for KCNC-TV,a CBS station in Denver. The station biodescribes Jesse as a “classically trained journalist,”who “worked in radio and TV news”before “jumping into the new world that is theInternet.”What about your transition to Internet journalism:How or why did it happen andwhat are the significant changes from ajournalistic point of view. At this point, doyou consider your role—an online journalist—isnew and evolving, or is it welldefinedand stable?I knew I was interested in journalismearly in college. It hadn’t hit me at Milton.In journalism schools, such as the one Iattended at the University of Wisconsin,they set you up in sequences; essentiallyyou can choose to prep for several years towork in public relations, newspapers orTV and radio. The Internet wasn’t really amedium for news then, and there certainlywasn’t a class where all you did waspublish news online. I think a lot of J-Schools around the country are still laggingin this area, actually. Enough onlinenews jobs are out there to warrant a separateonline sequence.Out of college I found work in radio andthen moved on to TV in an assignmentdesk role. At that time my TV station washiring for the Web, and I decided I wantedto switch gears. The concept of being ableto publish news online whenever it brokewas appealing to me.12 Milton MagazineI quickly found out that learning to workwith no deadlines was only the first in aseries of drastic shifts I would need tomake to my journalist’s mindset if I wasgoing to make it in this medium.I also had no idea about the rough roadthat was ahead in terms of employment.After the dot-com bubble burst I was laidoff two different times, and it was onlywith luck that I landed this job in Denver.Within the past two years, I’d say onlinenews jobs have grown more stable, andthere are more positions every day.However, journalists looking for onlinejobs should know that things are still veryfluid with the Web and new technologyand software is cropping up around everybend. One must not fear change if he orshe is working in an Internet position.“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”How would you describe your job?My job has changed drastically just thisyear. For three years I was our TV station’s“Webmaster,” meaning I was the only guywhose full-time concern was to keep ourWeb site going. This year, as Web manager,I’m leading a team of people we’vehired who are all devoted to online news.All Web sites are different, but I’d saymost online news gigs require a certainamount of ego-letting; your face isn’tgoing to be on TV and your byline won’tbe plastered on top of a news story eachday.This doesn’t mean the Web doesn’t haveits rewards. Our news director comes tome daily with questions about what wecan do with our Web site (Can we livestream our helicopter’s footage over awildfire? Can we post a 50-minute-longone-on-one interview a reporter did with anotorious convict? Can we present an allnightWeb-exclusive broadcast on electionnight?) I almost always am able to smileand say, yes, we can do just about anythingyou’d like on the Web. It’s a flexiblemedium, and with the right level of commitmenta Web site can become the ultimateauthority for any particular newsstory.On a nuts-and-bolts level, my job is essentiallythat of an aggregator—someone whodisassembles what we put to air andrebuilds it, enhances it in some way, andrepurposes it for our online audience. Ittakes a different skill set from your moretraditional journalist, but a lot of the traditionalskills do transfer.