In a recent post, Mindy McAdams of Teaching Online Journalism discusses the skills graduating journalists must have. I thought a mention was appropriate because one of my students, Jessica Schriendl, has a blog with The Joplin Globe in which she discusses the state of the industry and the appropriateness (or not) of government assistance for newspapers.
Thank goodness this list includes skills we have been stressing or are starting to stress at The Chart and in my Comm 111 Newswriting class at Missouri Southern State University.
The skills:
- Evidence of blogging and interaction with a wide range of blogs
- An understanding and active use of social media (Twitter, RSS, social bookmarking etc.)
- The ability to tell an engaging story using still images and audio (audio slideshow)
- Ability to shoot, edit and tell stories using video
- Basic ability to create interactive story elements using Adobe Flash
- Ability edit audio and produce podcasts
- Ability to file from the field breaking news
- Ability to moderate online discussion
(From Renee Barnes, a radio journalist in Australia who also teaches online journalism there. Posted on her blog News Frontier)
June 8, 2009 at 2:57 am
Okay TR, I agree with you, we need to know how to do all of these things. But who can do all these things in a day at a newspaper job and still have a life? I’m not criticizing you or Mindy McAdams for this post or idea, but you can’t do all of these things in a reasonable amount of time and still produce that pesky daily newspaper that still accounts for 95 percent of your revenue. At a small newspaper like ours, the reporter has to write three stories a day and shoot and process photos. In that case, when do I have time to create a slide show or even post an audio. Newspapers have to get reasonable about what they want from their reporters. If a newspaper wants all these cool new things on its Web site, it has to provide the bodies to produce these things and still put out that darned daily newspaper that, oh, by the way, still pays for the toys and people to produce all these neat new kinds of media. One last question, when is a newspaper going to require the same multi-tasking of its advertising sales staff?????
June 8, 2009 at 7:57 pm
BTW, you need to work on your free speech skills. Comments don’t have to have our approval before they appear on Idiococracy Now.
June 8, 2009 at 9:09 pm
OK, John. Two comments.
1. The item is about the skills graduating journalists must have, not about what every paper can or should do. That is a whole ‘nother debate.
2. That is real nice of you on Idiocracy Now. But I am one to err on the side of caution here. I think as more and more media outlets go online, libel law will start to treat comments like letters to the editor in the print product. Right now, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service” is to be treated as the publisher of information provided by someone else. But I think that is going to be an area of law that develops further.