Visual Editors

We’re all in this business, but probably only half of us planned it that way.

I’ve talked with professionals who have been in the field awhile about how they got into the design side of things and most were writers/copy editors or artists first. You kind of had to be - there wasn’t much of a design side to journalism.

But each year more and more students at the university level are pursuing visual journalism not after having written for their community newspaper or sketched their hand in art class, but after having scripted their own websites and computer games when they were still in elementary school. (Case in point: I recently met a student who was a computer science major but switched to journalism. Still can’t figure out why…) They probably knew what a keyboard was before a newspaper.

Thinking about these different mindsets (fine arts vs. computer engineering, if you will), I wonder how this will change the future of visual journalism. We’d like to think that we’re impartial, but the perspective of the performer inherently influences presentation. Perhaps a generation of natural-born programmers is going to take visual journalism to a radically new level? It should be interesting to find out.