by Leo Wiles
03 April 2019
Hi Anita, thank you for your query. It’s been a while since I hit the books for my own media and comms qualifications! So, I reached out to Dr Claire Konkes, Acting Head of Media and Lecturer in Media at University of Tasmania, to talk about the kind of skills you need these days.
Claire, whose illustrious journalism career includes titles as The Australian, The Mercury and The Monthly, kindly answered some questions for me:
Claire: Journalists, content producers and other communication professionals need to:
I have been teaching for about eight years and in that time I have seen the skills required for Journalism, Media and Communication (to define it as a discipline) merge – a few of our graduates might go straight to the ABC and stay there for a long time, but a lot more will move between digital content production, comms and journalism. As someone who will defend quality journalism to the end, the media landscape is a lot more diverse than the neat journo/PR divide of ten years ago.
Audiences: As the Thai say, media will be ‘Same, same, but different’. Audiences are fragmented, but the job of any communicator will be to identify their audience and sometimes it will be quite global in reach and other times it will be quite local.
Technical: the skills I mention above which is technical digital skills plus some understanding of the strategy it requires.
Perspective: In the past, journalists and others could get away with a fairly myopic understanding of their industry. Increasingly, some understanding of how various media industries work, including business models, how data is collected, is likely to be essential rather than just useful.
Do you agree with Claire or are there other skills you think you need to make a full time wage these days?
An understanding of how to package up stories for different audiences to create revenue streams may be useful eg. podcasts, interactive storytelling, microsites, databases https://www.journalism.cuny.edu/future-students/entrepreneurial-journalism/
Having a specialism is other advice from US – good insurance on top of general knowledge eg. Louise Milligan/Cardinal Pell, Maggie Haberman/Donald Trump. Can be anything that sets you apart as the expert if ever a story breaks (kinda like Hard Quiz?)
Many journalists these days will be loading their own work into the content management systems or CMS, so the ability to work with those (or pick it up quickly) is a must. So too is a basic knowledge of SEO and other digital skills like sourcing quality stock images, building EDMs in Mailchimp and organising content on a website.
Lynda.com has some great short courses if you need a refresher on these skills, and the Poynter website offers articles, webinars and other resources for US-oriented training.
Great one Madonna. I often find I need to record audio, video, take photos oh and do a write-up! Even if the client doesn’t use them all then and there there’s been the odd follow-up call where they’ll check to see if I happened to have…
Thanks for the tip Sharon. Certainly Lynda has been a lifesaver in the past when I have had to learn a client’s software editing package toot de suite.