JEA (Australia)

Pacific Journalism Review

Convergence conference
by Greg Treadwell

New skills required but they don't replace old ones - industry
Missouri convergence programme pulls in students
Google News no substitute for ‘great engine of newsgathering’

New skills required but they don't replace old ones - industry

While journalists these days may need to podcast their news item or appear on web-hosted video footage, the “fundamentals” of the job have not changed, a conference at AUT University heard this week.
Keynote speaker Julie Starr (right) told delegates that in an age of media convergence, even print reporters could increasingly expect to be in front of a camera, podcasting stories, recording their interviews or editing audio and video.
Journalists and educators gathered at the university to discuss the implications of the internet and other new technology.
A New Zealand-trained journalist, Starr played a major role in the recent development of the Daily Telegraph’s multimedia newsroom in London.
While the size of the operation would determine the extent of the convergence, multi-skilled journalists were required more and more, she said.
“At the Telegraph, for argument’s sake, we had a TV studio and we had an audio studio and we had an audio editor responsible for all the audio outputs,” she said.
“Reporters can definitely expect to write for multiple formats.
“All reporters now are writing for the web, it doesn’t matter where they work.”
Starr told journalism educators at the two-day Communication Convergence Curriculum conference that their graduates of 2010 would need the enthusiasm and willingness to adapt to change.
“I can’t stress that enough. At every aspect of our organisation, we’re looking for more flexible ways of working.
“But the fundamentals of journalism will never change. We need good people probably more than ever before.”
There was no getting around the need for balance, fairness, accuracy and proper attribution, she said.
But graduates would need to know more than one way to tell a story and to recognise if audio or video were required for the story.
They would also need “facility with the digital kit” and to know the basics of multi-media publishing.
“They don’t need to be an expert in everything but they need to know what’s right for the story according to our market,” she said.
Against a background of declining circulations and aging readerships, technology was changing readers’ habits, she said.
Broadband was seeing readers move online, and they were being followed by publishers and advertisers.
Finding itself way behind competitors like the Times and the Guardian, the Telegraph had recognised change was essential and brought the website from “under the stairs on the 11th floor” into the heart of the operation.
The paper’s mantra became: “Give readers what they want, when they want it, in the format they want.”
Fairfax’s New Zealand online group editor Sinead Boucher told delegates the multinational “media company” had also changed its focus quite dramatically.
“A year or two ago each of our newspapers had a web presence, an offshoot site attached to Stuff. But pretty much all of them were updated once a night by some long-suffering sub.
“They’re changing their focus to engaging with their own local communities during the day, breaking stories, [uploading] story updates, and asking for reader feedback, pictures and story tips.
“And we’re starting to see the dividends of that, in the newspapers as well as the web.”
A typical day at Fairfax now involved “web and print co-operation” and online news was part of daily planning processes, she said.
The Dominion Post now had a web editor sitting at the general news desk and involved in how each story was to be told.
Fairfax feature writers were now thinking about how they could tell their stories in a multi-media way.
“Fairfax staff have already had the message they are to file for the web as well, that they work for a media company.”
There was “a general acceptance that we know our jobs have changed”.
But she, too, stressed the need for the principles of good journalism to remain at the heart of training.
“If they can’t go out and get the stories in the first place with respect for accuracy, fairness and balance, then they aren’t much use to us.”
Challenges ahead for the industry included the uptake and quality of New Zealand broadband, convincing journalists the web was a good place to break stories and see their bylines and not losing sight of the need for specialists.
Newspapers also needed to build successful business models to fund good journalism.
“The web is not a competitor [to traditional news]. It’s chance to be a better journalist, to get back to those exciting things that got us into journalism in the first place, to break a story and have it up within a couple of minutes, well ahead of radio or television.”
AUT associate-professor Wayne Hope asked if the push for speed and immediacy in today’s media didn’t mirror the global television model of 24-hour rolling news and if that didn’t “undermine the flow and temporal rhythms of textual journalism”.
But Boucher said readers now expected to be able to turn to the web for the latest news.
“That doesn’t lessen our expectations of accuracy and proper attribution,” she said.
“We’re very careful to protect those standards.
“But we’re not just newspaper journalists. We have to change the way we present our content to our readers. They expect it.”
Starr said it wasn’t useful to think of one platform replacing the other. “We’re still going to want the bigger, considered piece the next day.”
The acting head of AUT’s communications school, Dr Alan Cocker, suggested we were “entering a time of news babble” and the time of informed and in-depth comment was passing.
But Starr said the more immediate news people got during the day, the more they needed the analysis in the next day’s paper.
“We’ve been getting away with publishing yesterday’s news for hundreds of years. But now we’ve been rumbled.”
TV3’s head of news and current affairs, Mark Jennings, said yesterday’s television journalist wrote for one medium and usually returned to the office to write their scripts.
Today’s journalist wrote and produced for the web, television and radio and fed news “to the news desk from anywhere in the world”.
Arriving at the scene of a breaking story, journalists now had to make decisions about the best way to tell the story.
TV3 now had a “story-centric” approach to news, rather than “device-centric”.
None of this replaced writing or other core journalistic skills. “But we are looking for additional things from people coming from training institutions,” Jennings said.

Missouri convergence programme pulls in students

Students are simply “knocking down the door” to get into the United States’ largest journalism school to train as multimedia reporters.
The Missouri School of Journalism’s innovative, four-year programme in “convergence journalism” was proving to be a big success, Professor Mike McKean told a conference at AUT University this week.
Students trained as convergence reporters are making good money and the course already has 100 students enrolled, he said.
“They’re knocking down the door to get into convergence.”
McKean (right) was a keynote speaker at AUT’s Communication Convergence Curriculum conference, which saw practitioners and educators come together to discuss the implications of technological changes in the industry for journalism curricula.
While newspaper circulations are falling worldwide, use of the internet for news continues to grow.
“Price Waterhouse Cooper projects most of the growth in the media in the next five years will be in convergent platforms,” said McKean.
To stay relevant in the new environment, journalists and their trainers needed to exploit the new news-telling tools, including video, audio, infographics, computer animation, internet slideshows, blogs and widgets.
These days journalists needed to embrace and help shape user-generated content – or citizen journalism – and “embed traditional journalism into the personal media space” through podcasting, viral marketing and mobile phone delivery.
After much discussion the University of Missouri came up with a programme based on three tenets of convergence – the media’s new business strategies, new ways in which to educate journalists and convergence as a new set of social relationships enabled by the media.
Its curriculum retained basic journalism training but includes a stream on convergence as well, including web-based production classes, electives on citizen journalism and a capstone class that includes a semester-long convergence project.
The university was now looking to build partnerships with overseas institutions and was already working with Moscow State University and Shantou University in southern China.
Associate professor Stephen Quinn, from Australia’s Deakin Unversity, told the conference the implications of convergence for journalism educators included the need for a strong focus on today’s fragmented audiences.
Among others were retaining quality while providing news conveniently for consumers in a hurry.
As well as the fundamentals of journalism graduates would need a “multimedia mindset”, business skills for freelancing and an awareness of the power of digital tools.
“It doesn’t mean every reporter has to be multi-skilled but they do need to know the strengths of the other mediums.”
Reporters would have to be able to recognise while platform was best suited to each story.
Meanwhile, subs and editors would become more like producers, also needing an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of print, video, audio and online and how to use them appropriately.

Google News no substitute for ‘great engine of newsgathering’

The “media tsunami” the world is experiencing is no replacement for honest, on-the-scene journalism, says the executive editor of the New York Times.
Bill Keller this week warned of dwindling reliability in the media, despite a global information explosion.
“The civic labour performed by journalists on the ground cannot be replicated by legions of bloggers sitting hunched over their computer screens,” he said.
Keller was delivering the annual Hugo Young Memorial lecture to an audience at Chatham House in London.
The Guardian reported him as saying the gravest danger to the future of newspapers was not political pressure, the “acid rain” of criticism from bloggers or even new technology upending the business model.
“It is a loss of faith, a failure of resolve on the part of the people who make newspapers,” he said.
A “media tsunami” now existing, comprising blogs, Google, RSS feeds and social networking on the internet.
“What is absent from the vast array of new media outlets is, first and foremost, the great engine of newsgathering – the people who witness events, ferret out information, supply context and explanation,” he said.
“Google News and Wikipedia don’t have bureaux in Baghdad, or anywhere else. With a few exceptions, they do not – in the cold terminology of the 21st century media business – create content.”
Keller’s comments came as New Zealand journalists and educators met at the Communication Convergence Curriculum conference at AUT University to discuss how changes in the media landscape might be reflected in training curricula.
The full text of his speech can be read here.