Based on what employers and recent graduates are telling him, a journalism professor compiles a list of skills demanded by the current job market. I find this list informational and am sharing it with my readers:
- Multimedia storytelling skills. Producing slideshows with sound, shooting and editing video and photos, writing for the web.
- Data and statistical skills for storytelling. Collecting, editing, analyzing and interpreting data to produce compelling interactive maps and graphics.
- Audience development skills (formerly known as marketing and circulation) such as managing online communities, interpreting data on audience behavior, crowdsourcing for information, interacting with the audience.
- Basics of programming. How to create compelling pages that attract web audiences.
- The business of media. Journalists can help a news organization generate revenues without compromising their ethics, and today that skill is more important than ever.
This list is retrieved from What journalism schools can and can’t teach students. In that article, James Breiner, the author, argues that a university cannot possibly teach students everything on that list. Breiner says, “No university can teach a student everything they need to know in their future career. That’s what life does.”
My own research also shows that universities are not doing enough to teach those skills. Last year, I surveyed more than 500 journalism/communication degree programs in U.S. for the type of digital skills courses offered; based on the survey findings, it seems few, if any, journalism programs have a curriculum that incorporates all the skills listed above. More and more j-schools are offering multimedia storytelling courses, but the other skills are not being adequately represented in the curriculum.
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