Traditional Concepts Most Important to Online Journalists

Once again in my survey of online journalists at North Carolina newspapers, we see a return to tradition. They say that news judgment and the ability to work under time pressure are the concepts that are most important to their jobs, while community management is far and away the least important of the 10 choices I gave them.

Also bringing up the rear of concepts that online journalists said were important to them: the ability to learn new technologies and awareness of new technologies.

And, interesting to note for those of us who teach students that it is more important to get it right than to get it first, the online journalists in my survey said that ability to work under time pressures was more important than attention to detail. As a group, they gave deadlines a higher average importance than details. As individuals, 63 percent of the respondents ranked time pressure more important than accuracy.

Oy vey.

At this point in my analysis, I have to conclude that one of two things is happening here:

  1. EITHER There is wide disparity between the skills, duties and concepts that I personally think should be emphasized in online newsrooms and in the skills, duties and concepts that are perceived as the most prominent and/or important in actual online newsrooms at North Carolina newspapers.
  2. OR This survey is totally FUBAR. Perhaps I asked the wrong questions of the wrong people.

To help me sort this out, I’m going to turn to a panel of experts — both in survey methodology and in online newsroom leadership. And, of course, your comments below are always helpful.

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Journalism Education: Training the Trainers

Earlier today I wrote about the duties of online journalists. One of the underlying purposes of my survey is to find out how journalism schools can better prepare students for the near future, and there were two popular duties that stood out as “soft skills” that are not emphasized in classrooms — teaching and training other people in the newsroom, and “project management.”

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Tampa Tribune Reorganization

Update: Shannan Bowen does a nice job summarizing the recent online conversation about this topic. The highlight? It is dominated by young journalists determined to do good work.

I would like to thank the Tampa Tribune for helping demonstrate the importance of knowing how newsrooms are organized — what skills, duties and concepts are held at different staff positions, and how those positions relate to each other.

The Tribune’s reorganization memo was posted to Romenesko yesterday. Thanks to Paul Jones for the tip.

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Duties of the Online Journalist: ‘Writers’ and ‘Trainers’

As a group, online journalists in North Carolina spend more time writing original stories for the Web than doing anything else. But that’s because a few journalists spend most of their time on that one duty, while most online journalists spend their time on an average of nine different duties.

Many of them are spending time on duties that don’t have an immediate, direct effect on their Web site’s content. The task of training and teaching their colleagues is the duty that an online journalist is most likely to have performed at least once during the last three months.

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Skills of Online Journalists Skew Traditional

In my survey of online journalists at North Carolina newspapers, I asked respondents to describe their proficiency in each of 17 different skills. What I found was that although online journalists are relatively young, their strength as a group remains in traditional skills of news judgment, grammar and AP style.

Here’s a table of the results.

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The Pimping Journalist: A Story of Money and Sincerity

Here’s an update to an earlier report about Chi-Town Daily News Editor Geoff Dougherty. He reports on the Media Shift blog that posting a story by an amateur “citizen journalism” on his site will likely cost him “between $90 and $125” in recruiting, training and other overhead costs. The amateur reporter doesn’t get anything.

Dougherty says a freelance story costs him “between $160 and $200” to get up on the site. Of that cost, the reporter gets “$125 or more per story.” That’s probably consistent with the per-story pay of an entry-level salaried reporter at a traditional paper who has a five-story-per-week quota (and let’s not even get in to the damaging impact of story quotas.)

But here’s the most important part of Dougherty’s post — he says that he doesn’t just spend less on amateur reporting; he argues that he gets MORE for less.

“Each one of the 60 or so citizen journalists working for us is an advocate for our site. They tell their friends and family about what we do, which helps drive traffic and recruit other volunteers.”

And this reminded me of a conversation I had last week with the staff of The Star-News in Wilmington, N.C.. One staffer who had a lot of experience engaging with her readers online said that sometimes she felt “like a pimp” when telling folks that she has just posted a new story in which they might be interested.

Rather than go in to my whole shpiel about how journalists need to learn from political campaigns, I tried to follow her analogy and explain that there was a difference between pimping and paying for dinner, and that the difference is sincerity.

Sharing thoughts and information with people for the purpose of building a long-term relationship with them is not pimping. Pimping is hawking services purely for transactional purposes, with no relationship implied or encouraged. Most folks can inherently tell when a human relationship is sincere and when it’s fabricated.

Which leaves me wondering this: Why are journalists not better public advocates for their own work? Why does Dougherty think that his freelancers don’t do the kind of advocacy work that his amateurs do?

After all, most journalists I know are rabid advocates for their own work when it comes to pitching stories to editors. Why, then, do they become such shrinking violets after the story is published?

Experience Levels of Online Journalists

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported the median age. (July 8, 1:16 p.m.)

In my survey of online journalists in North Carolina, I found that most have fewer than 10 years of experience in journalism.

The average years of experience was nearly 14, and the median was 10. But that’s because the years of experience ranged from one to 49.

The most frequent experience level was six years. Eleven percent of respondents reported they had done that much time in a newsroom.

Education Levels

  • At least an undergraduate degree: 82 percent:
  • Post-Graduate work: 19 percent

Rosen: ‘Press Freedom Is Shared Territory’

In comments on techPresident last night, Jay Rosen summarized nicely the reason that the discussions about “who is a journalist” and “what is journalism” are red herrings.

“Today, the press is shared territory. It has pro and amateur zones. This is appropriate because press freedom is shared territory.”

Press freedom is shared territory.

Warts and all, press freedom is shared territory. If we can start our conversations from that point, they will more constructive.

Press freedom is shared territory, and that’s territory I want far more Americans to settle.

More on The Future of Journalism

Several participants from last weekend’s Future of Journalism conference are beginning to blog. While I sit here in my pajamas, sucking my thumb (as all good bloggers do!) and pondering the topic by my lonesome, I wanted to share with you two good post from people who’ve already weighed in.

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Citizen Journalism and Authentic Leadership

This post is a written version of comments I presented yesterday at the Future of Journalism conference sponsored by The Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education and organized by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

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