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Skills of the online journalist

 

I found myself nodding in agreement as I read a new report on the job skills that online news managers look for when hiring journalists.

During my almost seven years as editor of nzherald I interviewed a lot of job seekers, and put them each through a series of job tests. These assessments had nothing to do with skills in Dreamweaver or Flash (popular topics at journalism schools it seems). Rather, what I looked for first and foremost were strengths in English language writing, attention to detail, news judgment, and team “fit”.

Max Magee, a Masters student at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Illinois, surveyed 438 online journalists late last year, principally via the membership list of the Online News Association. His report, The Roles of Journalists in Online Newsrooms, finds little difference between the views of managers and producers.

Editing and copy-editing skills and content creation skills should be at the core of an online journalism curriculum, not online production skills. However, students should master HTML, Photoshop and content management systems. Though content management systems vary widely in their architecture from site to site, the principles of using such a system are universal. Experience with any content management system while in school will likely help students more easily master the system they encounter as professionals. While not as important as the first three online production skills, Web usability was rated as being important by a significant number of respondents. Students wanting to work at a newspaper site should spend more time on Web design and multimedia skills. Finally, though hiring managers don’t deem it an essential skill for job candidates, online journalists can expect to do some metrics analysis – possibly because job performance is judged on such metrics – and so may benefit from some training in that area. Other technology skills – scripting languages, JavaScript and database design and administration – appear to be of more specialized importance and should thus be part of online journalism curriculum only on an elective basis.

Naturally, would-be online journalists need to understand the web. I always looked for the sort of person who “lived online”, and a standard interview question was “what are some of the most interesting things you’ve found on the web this week?”

As Magee writes:

In preliminary interviews while preparing this survey, online journalists said that what makes online journalism different isn’t so much the technical aspects as a different way of thinking. Online news producers described a willingness to learn new things, multitasking and teamwork as very important to the job. More generally, these attitudes were summed up as the ability to “think online” – and the ability to convince others to do the same.  They are the qualities that nearly all the hiring managers are looking for and that nearly all the producers use every day, and as such this category consistently outranked all of the other skill categories.

The Magee report makes good reading for anyone planning on studying – or teaching – online journalism.