Know How To Shoot Video and Do A Stand-Up? Know How To Edit A Package? Know How To Take Still Pictures? Know How To Do Live Audio? And Can You Write? Then Maybe You Could Be A Newspaper Journalist

Philip Stone May 7, 2008

Back when this writer went to through his university journalism training emphasizing newspaper reporting, there were several courses about the philosophy of journalism, there were news writing courses, there was one elementary photo course, but no audio and no video although those specialties were available to radio and TV undergraduates. Four years of all of that and one was supposedly ready to be a newspaper reporter. No more.

What a difference a generation makes. That type of university journalism training isn’t sufficient these days for the free weekly let alone a daily newspaper. For today the newspaper is no longer just paper, it is also video and sound and a newspaper that wishes to survive in today’s and tomorrow’s media world needs to adopt all of those skills for their digital platforms.

And that means that the people putting out those products need to be well-skilled in all of today’s journalistic platforms because in many cases it is one person who is going to do everything – go out to cover a story, write the breaking news for online, flesh it out for the newspapers, shoot the still pictures, shoot and edit the video, and don’t forget the podcast. And doing all of that begs the question that if one person is being asked to do all of that on a story then can quality on all platforms be where it should be?  

It doesn’t seem that long ago when this writer was at Reuters that the news agency would send out two photographers to cover a story– one to shoot for newspapers and the other to shoot for magazines; after all, said the photo wizards, those publications are completely different beasts with different needs, and what works well in a newspaper won’t work so well in a magazine and vice versa. But can journalism today afford such distinctions? And if one really wanted to aggravate editorial then make the suggestion that the television cameraman also covering the event could shoot stills, too? That all appealed to the money people but caused terrible consternation in the newsroom.

But in today’s world the plain fact is that newspaper journalists have to be multi-skilled as never before. And that fact was made clear in this year’s Newsroom Barometer poll conducted by Zogby International for Reuters and the World Editors Forum.  The poll of 704 senior editors from around the world found that 86% expected that print and online newsrooms  must integrate and that will become the norm and 83% said they believe their journalists must be able to produce content for all media within five years.

The only amazing thing about that is that they are giving their journalists five years. It will need to be accomplished far sooner than that!

Being a journalist has never been a high-paying profession unless one reaches some level of infamy and the survey indicated low pay will probably continue. Two-thirds of the editors believe some editorial functions will be outsourced which means if something starts getting expensive on City Desk USA then that function could well be transferred to City Desk, Bangalore.

One question perplexing publishers around the world is whether the public will continue to actually pay for newspapers? With free newspapers in many major cities, and free news online will the public continue to support print’s subscriber model?

We won’t dwell on the circulation losses of the past five years, or that the Economist headlined last week “On the Brink” suggesting some US newspapers “face extinction”, but are people really willing to continue paying  for their print news?

A majority of editors, 56% -- up from 48% last year -- believe news in the future will be free, although it should be noted the majority of those views came from such emerging markets as South America, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Asia, whereas in Europe and the US a little less than half thought free would win the day.

And the biggest problem of all, according to 58% of the respondents, is that the young are not reading newspapers. Yes, they take a look at free newspapers and then throw them away, but young people actually paying for newspapers are becoming endangered species.

No one has yet figured out the solution and time is running out because, not to put too fine a point on it, the older readers are dying off and they are not being replaced by the young.

Even more reason why the future of print is online, according to the survey, with 44% saying they believe on-line will be the most common platform for reading news in the future.  That’s up slightly from last year while those who believe print will prevail was down slightly.

What does it all mean? Newspapers understand they are now content providers on as many different platforms as they can penetrate. That means their journalists must be skilled to file their reports using all the various platform skills, and the sooner the better. Is “reporter” the right word anymore to describe the job? In the new journalistic world it’ seems more like “content manager”.