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New media skills are key to editorial quality, editors' poll finds

Posted: 27/03/07 By: John Thompson

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A survey of senior news executives worldwide has found that more than a third believe training journalists in new media skills would be their first priority to achieve editorial quality, with recruiting more journalists being their second.

The survey, Newsroom Barometer 2007, undertaken by the World Editors Forum (WEF) in partnership with Reuters and Zogby International, questioned 435 managing editors and editor-in-chiefs of regional, local, national and international newspapers.

Among other questions, they were asked "If you had to invest in editorial quality, what would you do first within the newsroom?".

Thirty-seven per cent said they would train journalists in new media skills, 23 per cent would recruit more journalists, 19 per cent would re-train in traditional skills, 10 per cent would add more opinion analysis writers, six per cent would replace staff with younger journalists, and 5 per cent would take another, unspecified, approach.

The higher their circulations, the more interested newspapers were in acquiring more new media skills - 41 per cent of those with circulations in excess of 200,000 compared with 34 per cent among smaller papers.

North and South American news executives were the most keen on new media (41 per cent); while Asia and Western Europe (31 and 35 per cent respectively) favoured retraining in traditional skills or recruiting more journalists.

When asked "What would you do second?", North America also emerges as being the most keen on recruiting more journalists at 24 per cent, compared with 11-15 per cent of editors from other regions who prioritise recruitment.

Graph showing how editors would invest to achieve better editorial quality

Graph showing how editors would invest to achieve better editorial quality

Pie chart courtesy of Editors Weblog

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recruitment | training |

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