New media skills needed for modern journalists

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 Today's brand of journalism has changed dramatically since the public use of the internet but much more so since the advent of social media. As we can see from this chart provided by the Pew Research Center, Americans use of social media has increased greatly in the last 15 years. 

Source: Pew Research Center

  This number is only expected to go up in the next several years. With that being said journalists need to learn new skills if they want to stay competitive …and employed. New media skills include learning how to read datasets and analytics, photo and video editing software, digital publishing, search engine optimization and online marketing. The training is usually paid for those already working for a media entity. However, for those that consider themselves citizen or independent journalists, training can be somewhat hard and/or expensive. Some companies such as Adobe (which is widely used throughout the media industry and regarded as the standard) have recognized this issue and have set up free or low-cost tutorials to their software to assist those that new to learn or refresh their skills. Other sites such as coursera.org and udemy.com collaborate with hundreds of colleges and companies throughout the world to provide digital communication courses- again at either no or low cost to anyone who desires it. 

In the past it was feared that the digitization of communication would ruin traditional journalism but I disagree with that notion, in fact I think it has enhanced traditional journalism and brought it back to its roots of being a servant to the public.




Resources:

Adobe. (2020, n d). Adobe. Retrieved from Adobe.com: https://www.adobe.com/

Coursera Inc. (2020, n d). Coursera. Retrieved from Coursera.org: https://www.coursera.org/

Pew Research Center. (2019, June 12). Social media fact sheet. Retrieved from Pewresearch.org: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/

Udemy, Inc. (2020, n d). Udemy. Retrieved from Udemy.com: https://www.udemy.com/

 


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