Between the arrival of #FakeNews, the collapse of many a mighty title (RIP Rolling Stone Australia), and the increasingly endemic erosion of best-practice, the ol' media rat race is not the job it once was.
Back in the day, before the digital age moseyed along with its promises of ubiquitous, un-monetised information, journalism was a far easier profession to navigate. But with the birth of the internet, cracks began to form in the way our technologically driven society engaged with the press. Today, thanks to the seismic pressures of mobile devices and social media, and the rise of polarising blogs and fringe sites, those stress fractures have opened into great chasms, with pop-culture platforms, youth media and populist power-brokers on one side, and the old guard of mainstream media on the other.
Another way to look at this division is the separation between those media that are clinging by their fingertips to the professional standards of those halcyon, pre-internet days, and those media that have thrown out the rule book to coax those sweet, sweet clicks from an itinerant audience. But increasingly, the old school faithful are surrendering to the dark arts so skilfully deployed by the Millennial media moguls dominating the digital arena.
And this is exactly the kind of adaptability that journalists should be prepared for. Too many major publishers have tried pulling a King Canute to hold back the unstoppable tide of change, only to roll out redundancies on an industrial scale. However, trading in the currency of youth zeitgeist is not as simple a transaction as those newspaper veterans might assume.
Take, for example, a piece recently published in The Daily Telegraph about the results of a Facebook Messager and YouGov Galaxy survey into teen slang, or as they dubbed it, "teenglish". The written equivalent of Regina George's mum in Mean Girls, its deciphering of the most "in" lingo was so saturated with desperation, it failed to notice that the most "in" word on its list - "dude" - has been around for literally decades. (Not to mention the hypocrisy of a right-leaning paper, with a history of demonising the LGBTQIA+ community, trumpeting words appropriated from African-American drag culture, like "yass kween" and "shook"). Add to this the Tele's close-but-no-cigar definitions of this teenglish glossary ("Lit: when something's going extremely well." Oh, the irony) and it really does underline how hard this article face-plants into the uncanny valley of millennial relevance
On one level, perhaps the Tele can give itself a pat on the back for giving this getting-down-with-the-young-people thing a red hot go? Or perhaps, it shouldn't condescend to an entire generation by simplifying it into a list of misunderstood colloquialisms? To put the aforementioned article to good use: Daily Telegraph, don't be "shook" (surprised) when people get "salty" (a bit angry) when you're so "basic" (only interested in the mainstream). "K" (OK)? Sorry if that's a bit "savage" (a rude person) "dude" (mate).
