Online journalism requires traditional skills
Cyberjournalist pointed me to a study that University of North Carolina professor Ryan Thornburg completed about the values of online journalists.
The survey asked each journalists what took up the biggest percentage of their time out of 24 duties in the past three months.
- Writing Original Stories - 16%
- Other Duties - - 9%
- Editing Text for Content - 6%
- Project Management - 6%
- Blogging - 6%
- Photo/Image Editing - 6%
- Staff organization/administration - 5%
- Training or teaching other staff - 5%
- Writing headlines or blurbs - 4%
- Working on business issues - 4%
But if you look at the tasks as a measure of frequency:
- Training or teaching others in their newsroom: 39 journalists said they’d done this at least once during the last three months.
- Writing headlines or blurbs: 37 said they’d done this.
- Photo/image editing: 36 journalists.
- Editing text for content: 33.
- Project Management: 32.
- Editing for grammar/style: 32.
Hmm, looks pretty traditional to me. Here’s a table of the skills these journalists have. From the list you can see there’s a variety of expertise in various programs, from Soundslides, to audio and video editing and production, HTML, Photoshop, Flash programming and much more. Notice news judgment and grammar and style? Those are the highest rated of the whole bunch.Thornburg questions whether the results are skewed due to a high population of Gannet papers in North Carolina.
I don’t think an online journalist necessarily needs to know how to write for the paper to be a good journalist. But whether they create video, edit audio, blog, or develop Flash presentations, they need to know how to tell a story. David Postman, the political blogger from the Seattle Times, writes all of his content for his blogs (his editors occasionally use his material for the dead tree edition).
Are these changes not happening at small and mid-market newspapers? Are they just not happening in North Carolina? Or is this whole thing just a myth perpetuated by snake oil salesmen? Are those skills not valued by hiring managers?
I have my own thoughts on this, but I’ll look for Thornburg’s next post instead.