Friday, February 20, 2009

Skills training - what should we be doing for the digital journalist

Skills training is not enough for the digital journalist

wrote the following on 2009-02-18. Here's a snippet and below my response

...The skills, though, aren't the answer. As one news executive said, "We need to take staff to Web 2.0 and beyond – to make learning more nimble and flexible." This executive, after putting staff through training pilots, realized that multimedia literacy and a basic understanding of what it meant to work in a Web environment was what people needed – before they could go about learning the hardware.

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My Response

The premise was clear, if journalism was about providing information/ facts, why wouldn't we use everything we could conceive of to do that job.

An expedition to Gallipoli to war graves in the Dardanelles from WWI resulted in a blog, article, radio piece for the BBC World Service, Video and promo. This was 1999, a few years before web 2.0.

I had been a Videojournalist by then for five years and a network producer/ reporter for 11 having worked for the BBC, ABC News, WTN et al.

Nice post Nikki. Like you today I'm an academic and other things.

I'd argue, you might agree, this is a much deeper disco which requires more sustained attention in these transitional times.

Firstly, the new art of journalism, multimedia and that's how I view it, "an art" requires different creative modes of thinking - design, narratology, image aesthetics etc.

(Network) journalists at best can find the appropriation of terms such as "network" frustrating. That's not Becket's fault. And when did a conversation become a conversation . How does that work? I'm not claiming ignorance. This shift to this new weburnalism is attitudinal.

Can we teach creativity? No, correction, can we learn to be creative? For even teaching and learning aren't the same.

My point there's semiotic and linguistic differences that tend to alienate people, just as I/we might get annoyed trying to learn a foreign language, and that is a huge impediment.

In many cases it's not that we don't have the right tools, it's the orthodoxy and methodologies that need rewiring and often that's a lengthier, more radical process.


Cheers
David

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