Tomorrow's News, Tomorrow's Journalists

‘Old’ skills and new skills are mutually beneficial

You use the core skills to dig out a story and you use your new media skills to communicate it with your readers. They are non-competing. This is where I think much of the debate is wrong. It’s not a case of one or the other, they are mutually beneficial.

One set is for sourcing news, the other is for communicating it.

Andy Halls has already highlighted what I think new journalists need. A mix of  ‘old’ journalism skills – like a nose for a good story, contact building, concise writing – alongside understanding the significance and relevance of new technologies in journalism. Core skills and innovation will equal great, modern journalism.

So now we need to focus on implementing these skills, knowledge and technologies.

At a news meeting, we should no longer think of an article as a singular entity – we should think of it as a package. How can I make this story as much as it can be? How can I give the reader everything they need and more? A web page is a blank canvas, so it’s time to be innovative and creative.

Once you have a story, start thinking about telling it using slide shows, video clips, audio clips, Google maps with plotted information, and so much more. There is a plethora of applications and widgets for an unfathomable amount of uses.

The BBC’s online coverage of the G20 protests last year is a fantastic example of ingenuity. They updated a live map on what was happening around the streets of London. Wherever they had some form of coverage – be it photos, text, videos or audio – wherever the news was taking place, content was gathered and updated on the map.

This is the future. Not just a static block of text, retrospectively reporting the events, but exciting, up-to-the-minute live coverage that you can see and hear for yourselves. Or useful statistical information presented in a tactile graph on a website. This will keep readers on your site for longer and encourage more to come in the first place. Knowing how to present your story, sourced using old-style journalistic prowess, using new and innovative communication methods will be vital.

This is what I’ll be pushing my team at The Linc to do next year. I’ll be telling them to bring stories and at least one way of using new media to tell the story or present information.

Then, of course, there’s social networking. The viral nature of sites like Twitter make them great platforms to promote your work. Depending on your content, there’s potential to massively boost your hit count and exposure. We need to keep up-to-date with these new technologies. Above all, we need to be using them.

In sum: ‘old’ skills and new media skills go hand in hand – so you’ll need both.