The functions of a journalist changed so much that we might come to call journalist a guy who’s spending his time mostly on social media and knows HTML. But does it apply locally, too?
When I got my first job as a reporter, back in 2007, this was one of the few positions someone could hope for within the journalistic field. What’s a reporter supposed to do? Well, things like tracking possible subjects, doing interviews, keeping in touch with authorities, following-up on events and, of course, writing. But this first job of mine wasn’t within a print newspaper, but a news website, called FrontNews.
Quickly changing
My job as a reporter wasn’t quite fitting the classic job description either. Apart from working on my own subjects, a big part of my work consisted in monitoring competitors and keeping up with them. Plus, I had to look out for photos that would’ve matched the news I was working on. This was, no doubt, part of a subtle shift toward a new web-based age regarding jobs in journalism. And if Twitter and Facebook were at that time what they are today, for sure they would have been a must.
The real shift
Two years later, in 2009, when I was working as a reporter within weekly business magazine Money Express, I joined Twitter and the global conversation and started following different people from the communication field working here and there. This is how I got to follow @Steve Buttry and came to read his great post on how to land your next job in digital journalism. Along with tips for building a pitch to sell to your next boss, he also gives some impressive examples of how people can creatively apply for a job. Not to mention that he is working as a Director of Community Engagement at TBD, a top news website covering Washington D.C. How does that sound for a job in journalism?
But this seems to be just the peak of the iceberg if you keep reading Steve Buttry and go on to journalismlives.com, a blog exploring how innovators in the new news ecosystem leverage interactivity to improve news gathering and delivery. As @David Kennedy writes in this post, new positions arise within journalism and new requirements break in the job description for journalists, like administering Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, using Cover It Live and having basic HTML knowledge.
What about Romania?
As of Romania, there is still no sign that media outlets will dive in the new era of journalism. Maybe, as Cosmin Alexandru says here, 2011 will be the last shot they have. At this moment, Hotnews.ro, one of the best news websites in the country, has only two Twitter accounts: one for the most important news, the other for news in English (this one having only 99 followers). Evenimentul Zilei, another top newspaper and news website has only one Twitter account. Only Adevărul has +10 Twitter accounts, covering its major regional editions. Not to mention the lack of using other new media tools for covering news like Google maps (example from NYT), and even the old SMS.
The proof that people here need this kind of coverage is the decrease in the sales of printed newspapers and even in the overall news consumption, whilst more and more people have access to phones that are capable of connecting to the Internet and join social media communities. There are now more than 2,2 million Romanians on Facebook. What media outlets should do is the same: help people make sense of the world. But they should do it in the most modern way possible.
There are also huge differences in terms of job requirements. Here are the main requirements of a job posted on ejobs.ro for a position of junior web editor:
How to do it- capacity of doing repetitive tasks
- fluency in English
- use of MS Office
- good use of Internet as a main source of information
- stress adapted
- capacity to select and synthesize relevant information
As a plus to this article, I want to add below a piece of a short email exchange with Steve Buttry done in June 2010, explaining how a reporter can do his job in a multimedia world:
Me: How can a reporter cover an event both on print/online and Twitter? How can he tweet about things he’s discovering right now and at the same time keep gathering information, interviewing, taking notes. It seems like there’s no chance for a narrative journalism piece, but even a 10(or more)-paragraph news piece can require a lot of effort and might not be finished quickly enough.
Steve Buttry: It’s a challenge, but you gain some experience as you try to juggle Twitter and/or liveblogging with print demands. Ron Sylvester (@rsylvester) of the Wichita Eagle is a master at this, twittering a riveting narrative from the courtroom regularly. Trish Mehaffey of my old newspaper, The Gazette, is also excellent at this. I suggest using CoverItLive (which can take Twitter feeds and hashtags). The liveblog or Twitter stream provides a real-time narrative that is more detailed than you will have room for in print. It also makes an excellent notebook for the print story.
Reporters who are experienced at this can cut and paste deftly from the liveblog or Twitter stream when writing a story for the print edition. Also, one of the biggest problems with event stories historically in print is the reporter’s tendency to cram too much stuff into the story and not write a really good summary. If you’re liveblogging, you can write a good summary and refer people to a replay of the liveblog for full details. This keeps reporters from trying to cram one or two more details into the story, when the details don’t really work out of context anyway. It takes practice, but when you place digital first, you write a good liveblog (using Twitter or directly into CoverItLive) and make that the top priority. Then you find you can write a pretty good print story, too.
