New Media Skills

A lot of young people know how to blog and produce podcasts and videos, but they don’t possess journalism skills or journalistic instincts. Ideally it requires someone who has both news and web/multimedia instincts.

As someone who dabbles in various forms of media, I often get asked what type of skill sets would be needed for New Media journalists.

As traditional news media gears itself to do battle with purely online news players, there is a huge demand for staff.

The right type of people, of course, are those who are news-savvy and web- and multimedia-savvy at the same time.

That’s harder to find than you’d expect. News-savvy people are not necessarily web-savvy.

Sure, they browse the web but a surprisingly high number of journalists and editors do not maintain blogs.

Nor do many of them know how to shoot and edit photos or record and edit audio or video.

There are a lot of young people who know how to blog and to produce podcasts and videos for YouTube, but they don’t possess journalism skills nor do they have journalistic instincts.

So, to get someone who has both news and web/multimedia instincts is actually a very hard task. It’s not surprisingly though.

There are not that many journalism schools in this country and extremely few colleges have New Media classes.

Since the students are not being formally trained to do all these kinds of things, they will have to rely on themselves. How many are motivated to do so?

And I don’t blame them. When I was in college, I don’t recall doing extra work. I just did what I needed to pass my classes.

As for the traditional journalists who are used to writing for print, unless they are given training and incentives they will not rush to embrace the New Media.

They will consume it but they won’t produce it.

To do New Media properly requires setting up teams that can handle multimedia on the fly.

For example, a reporter should not just be taking notes from a news scene or press conference but also shoot images, record sound bites and possibly even record video snippets of the event.

That same reporter must be able to edit and transmit or upload such content from wherever they are instead of waiting to come back to the newsroom to do all that.

That requires them to have a laptop loaded with the appropriate software and wireless Internet connection.

The tools are there. So all this can be done today.

But to achieve this requires a mindset change amongst editors and reporters used to preparing news for print.

And for that to happen, there needs to be real buy-in by the top management.

As a start, a news media organisation needs to embrace New Media wholeheartedly, not treat it as some after thought.

When the top management is all for it, there is a strong trickle-down effect.

The troops get motivated because they see the commitment is for real.

Having bosses who encourage staff to pick up multimedia skill sets makes all the difference in the world.

When I began my career in journalism, working for Japan’s leading English-language newspaper, all I did was write articles.

But in my second year in journalism, I had a rude shock when my bureau chief, who had until then done all the photography for the news stories I wrote, told me that I had to start taking my own photos.

I protested, saying I didn’t know how to shoot pictures.

“We will get you a digital camera, so you can make all the mistakes you want,” he responded.

“Just shoot a lot of pictures and some of them will turn out fine.”

I had no choice and started shooting my own pictures. I resented it at first. I just wanted to write but sure enough, as my photo skills improved, I began to enjoy taking news pictures.

That was my first experience at multi-tasking.

Several years later, when the dotcom boom arrived, I realised I had to develop online journalism skills if I wanted to thrive in the digital age.

I had to learn not just how to carry out research online but also to write and manage content for the new medium.

I threw myself into cyber-journalism — acquainting myself with the differences between writing for print and online.

One of the first things I learnt was that online readers don’t read, they scan.

So, online copies must be short, crisp and concise. It was hard at first, adjusting to the shortened word-length but after a while, I got the hang of it.

Another thing I learnt to do was blogging. I’m sure I wasn’t the first person to take up blogging in Malaysia but I was the first professional journalist to do so.

Skip forward a few years and I found myself having to learn to condense news stories again — this time into tiny 160-character messages. Yes, this was for SMS news alerts — something many news organisations offer these days. It wasn’t easy for me.

How do you capture the essence of a news story in just a few words? It had to be done and so I learnt a new meaning to the phrase “tight copy”.

In the past year, I’ve learnt how to record and edit audio and video. I didn’t take classes. I just bought my own equipment and editing software and learned by trial and error. The recording bit is actually a lot easier than the editing bit, which takes more patience and time.

Learning New Media skill sets can be painful. Learning anything new is hard. But once you get the hang of it, it’s very fulfilling.

As a content creator you feel empowered because you can produce content in various forms - text, photos, audio and video.

You can produce content like never before.