Page 163 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

Multimedia Journalism: Putting It All Together

an astonishingly professional TV news spot,” he said. “Not many of
them, but they’re there and more will be coming. I think if I were
coming into journalism now I would supplement whatever my basic
interest might be—newspaper reporting, broadcast reporting—with as
much as I could learn about how to produce web-based news reports.”
Tyner expected that in the next few years reporters would cover stories
for their newspaper or TV station but be asked to create actual Web
reports with video and audio in addition to doing a more traditional
report (Tyner 2004).
Gil Thelen, publisher of the Tampa Tribune, believes multimedia
skills are more likely to be needed in newsrooms in smaller markets.
“As you go up the size scale of media organizations, the skills tend to
become narrower,” he said. The main skill Thelen said he was look-
ing for when hiring was craft mastery—being proficient in one aspect
of journalism. It was vital, he said, for journalism schools to prepare
graduates capable of doing craft-level work, but students also needed
to have what he called a multimedia literacy. “Not mastery, but an
awareness of how the various media work” he said. “Broadcast journal-
ists need to be able to write a fundamental print story. Print people 153
need to be able to be able to do a simple stand-up. I call that multi-
media literacy.” Students also needed to be lifelong learners and to be
comfortable working in teams, Thelen said (2004).
Nora Paul, who directs the new media program at the University
of Minnesota, believes the multi-skilled journalist is not a new idea.
“It’s the old one-man band at television stations,” she said, where some
people were expected to be able to shoot and report. Paul said people
needed to get away from thinking in terms of the medium in which
journalists delivered their product, “and then how can that be deliv-
ered best to a variety of platforms.” Paul said it was silly for reporters
to identify themselves as a broadcast journalist or a print journalist.
“That’s a ridiculous thing in this world where broadcast journalists are
going to end up online, and print journalists’ work is going to be part
of the web site,” she said. The more relevant distinction was whether
someone was a word or a visual person. “If you are the visual person
then you need a clear understanding of how best a visual works in
print, [and] how it translates for online and then what plays well for
TV, just as the word person needs to know what kind of lead works best
for a newspaper versus online versus if you’re writing for television.”
Paul said this was a more feasible way to think about multimedia “and
all journalists need to know how the other media works to combine