Jeff Jarvis declares that news organisations should be retraining their staff for the new media age.Adam Tinworth, after a year of trying to do just that, pauses to bash his head repeatedly against his desk…….

– For some of online jobs, you do need some tech skills, strong photoshop, video/online editing experience, and general comfort with html. Most of these can be picked up with experience and as a hobby blogger. But the training you are offering at CUNY is absolutely essential.

– I know print reporters with tech skills who would be ideal candidates for online editing jobs, but for the same reason they never wanted to be an print editor, they don’t want to be an online editor. They know their print reporting job is potentially at risk, but all they ever wanted in life was to be a reporter. It’s too hard a move for them. It’s the hardest thing, really.

– I think there is a bias against recognizing existing newsroom talent. Many reporters have secret or not-so-secret lives as bloggers. Most reporters totally understand what’s going on; they’ve picked up some of the technical skills needed, and they may be in sync with the newsroom mantra to focus on online first. But they’re up against management that is in a semi-panic state about shifting ad revenues and is focused on hiring people with experience. There’s no time for training in a 24-hour news cycle.

– There’s a lot of mistrust. In an effort to build as much traffic as possible, freelance budgets are increasing. There is much worry that print salaries will be shifted, more and more, to freelance. The abilty of a story to generate traffic may be the first consideration. Editors may praise stories that bring page views, only to frustrate reporters with beats that have less drama or hope of getting in a Google news cluster. Online editors are evaluated on how effective they are at driving traffic and now reporters are being evaluated on that as well — and often by content managers who haven’t necessarily proved themselves as capable reporters.

This shift in how newsrooms operate and the skills they need is, obviously, not going happen easily and there’s going to be a lot of blood on the floor. There all ready is. But while I think think there’s a lot more that managers can do to ease the transition, even for those mangers who have opened the doors to change to newsroom staff, the career implications for many reporters are just too hard to deal with. There’s resistance and misstep all around.

That’s how it has always been.

That’s one of the ways that we get more stuff (including food) for less. It’s how we get better stuff, and stuff that we never had before.

That’s also the source of new interesting things to do.

There are many other newspapers that are already taking the plunge into video.

I know there must be many that are not … Still, though, your post makes it sound like NO newspapers are doing it, which is not true.

There has been a relentless push to eliminate the most expensive employees in every industry. This has coincided with the parallel effort to eliminate unions as well. In the few cases where the unions had enough residual clout to force some sort of retraining program the results have been lackluster.

Even NYC has now done the same thing to the school system. Senior teachers are being forced out because they are “inflexible” and replaced by novices. This is going on even when these actions produce a shortage of teachers. The impetus to get rid of the feisty, unionized, older teachers is seen as more important than staffing the classrooms. The trend toward charter schools is also part of the effort. They usually aren’t unionized and in many cases the credentials required to teach are less than those in the public schools.

The same trend can be seen in academia. It is almost impossible for emerging Ph.D.’s to get a full-time, tenured, position anymore. Only adjuncts or those on non-tenure track appointments are being hired.

Some of this is motivated by authoritarian tendencies that have surfaced in this country over the past 40 years, but a lot of it is motivated by the bottom line. Those who worked in the professions frequently held themselves and their profession to a higher standard. They are now an impediment to those who want to control things. Ethics and professionalism have no place in a top-down society.

It would be interesting to know if there is any ideological bias as to who gets fired in the news business. Are those who are personally more “liberal” more likely to be fired?

it’s unclear to me where are these “internet side careers” they are supposed to transfer to… there certainly appears to be plenty of money on the “internet side” of things but NOT in doing the work… (in getting hoards of *others* to do it or in profiting from it in some way… that “opportunity” doesn’t seem to be a realistic one when you are talking about large numbers of people — only a very limited number could successfully be that kind of “entrepreneur” and the whole affair is morally questionable to boot…)

Delia

One way of doing it is to force journalists to learn new media. I think many journalists now, including some that I know in my country, are blogging. And they’re now familiar with YouTube. But are they using it as tools in their jobs? Maybe not yet. Maybe it’s a good start to define what skills are necessary for one to be called a new media journalist? Basic computer literacy? Should have a blog? Internet-savvy? Video production but how sophisticated could it get?

cheers,
erwin

Patrick,
That’s exactly what we’re trying to do at CUNY. Every student there learns how to make video, audio, blogs, wikis, slideshows, photos, and so on and also uses this to examine the new architecture of news media and the new means of gathering news and telling stories. We strongly agree with you.

Having said that, I fully agree that newspapers and traditional media should train their staff - and that staff should be quite vocal in asking about it themselves. I’m thinking workshops, seminars and lots of hands on projects to gradually ease the whole journalist’s function into whatever the new model to be adopted will be.