UT Panelist: Journalists Now Need Multiple Skills
Knoxville News, a community blog, bullet points one panel’s highlights from Journalism and Electronic Media Week at the
University of Tennessee’s College of Communication and Information.
Jack Lail, Knoxville News Sentinel, highlights:
Newspapers are looking for reporters with more diverse skills. In addition to writing skills, photography, videography, and even technical online publishing/web skills (with a background in journalism) are increasingly valuable because of the convergence and blurring of lines between online and print media.
He presented statistics including this one:
Ranked in comparison to the KNS’s target market/demographic (with an exact match being 100), the 18-34 age group scores 62 for the daily print edition, 73 for the Sunday print edition, and 126 for the online web edition. Clearly, younger readers prefer to get their news online. The results are opposite for 55 and over, as you might expect.
Here are highlights from Jim Stovall, University of Tennessee:
An online news website is not a newspaper or TV online. It has 5 distinguishing characteristics: capacity (virtually unlimited), flexibility (to package news in a variety of formats), immediacy (of text, but also of depth and choice), permanence (easy to duplicate and retrieve), and interactivity (the most important characteristic — it will change the process of journalism, journalism at arm’s-length is no more).
The three critical parts of web journalism are: lateral reporting (packaging the news in the best form for the story, i.e. text, video, photo gallery, or a combination, but reporting is still the key), backpack journalism (reporters learning to use all the tools such as digital recorders and cameras, video, and the software used to produce it), and web-packages (the end product, a story package with all the accompanying text, photos, video, audio, etc.)
