Survival skills in new age journalism

When I told my friends back at home that I would study the convergence module, they gaped, confused: “What on earth is convergence journalism?” I was probably one of the first people from Vietnam coming to Mizzou with the intention of getting a MA degree in online journalism and I landed on something even more fancy and state-of-the-art.

I believe that backpack journalism or convergence journalism, however you put it, in the future will be a survival skill of this career. Competitions mean that newsrooms must get more and more efficient and a reporter needs to be able to do many jobs.

This is especially true in my field: online journalism. One will need to write the story, take photos, produce a video and radio version for it, and then put it online. At present, my colleagues and I already have to write, edit and take pictures for our articles. However, my newspaper is already taking steps in developing the multimedia elements for the website. And we are not likely to afford a new bunch of people sitting in the lab just producing video and audio files. After all, that is what many citizen journalists are already doing, and most of them do other jobs to earn their living. It does not make sense that we professionals cannot play the same game, and we should be able to do so at a more advanced level.

As for the statement that “a jack of all trade is master of none” by Martha Stone, she discounted the fact that people were expected to be able to do more and more nowadays. Just several years ago, knowing English in my country is alone sufficent to find a well-paid job, but that is no longer true now. In fact, today, not knowing English means that it will be very, very difficult for you to find any white-collar employment. The same thing goes with multimedia skills. They are just part of the package a journalist needs to possess to be able to survive.