I am delighted that my friend and colleague Jane Singer has won a contest on the future of journalism held by the AEJMC.
Singer, from the University of Central Lancashire and University of Iowa was voted the winner for her entry, entitled, Bird’s-Eye View.
In her contribution, Singer is positive about the future of journalism, while acknowledging that shape of the industry is going through a period of upheaval and transformation.
She sees several emerging roles:
1) The incubating journalist: Undergraduate journalism education
In this stage, journalism students gain a university education that ideally develops abilities to learn, think, experiment, focus, socialize and grow, and prepares them for an entry-level job that includes training and practice in multiplatform content creation and maintenance, routine reporting, editing and self-editing, blogging and working with users.
2) The fledgling journalist: Entry-level employment
This is an entry-level journalist who tells stories across platforms with primary emphasis on maintaining the media organization’s website, including information gathering, posting stories, blogging and working with users.
3) Learning to fly: The newsroom apprenticeship
Singer sees this as the newsroom apprenticeship during which entry-level work expands over time to work on more sophisticated journalistic products. This includes training and mentoring by more senior journalists, as well as working on more advanced forms of multimedia story-telling.
4) Taking wing: Senior journalists
These are the senior, more experienced journalists who, in Singer’s words, “produce the ‘value-added’ content, including most of the material that requires payment to access, either online or in the legacy product or both”. These are the journalists who provide analysis and commentary, or work on more in-depth multimedia specials, as well as mentoring younger journalists.
Singer’s roadmap for journalists presents a clear progression of skills and responsibilities. But it would also require an investment in the people in the newsroom, setting aside time for training and development.
Unfortunately, this could be an optimistic assessment, coming at a time when newsrooms are cutting back on staff and the remaining journalists are asked to do more with less.
Journalists are the prime resource of the news industry. An investment in the people that are the lifeblood of journalism is in investment in the future of journalism itself.
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