Like Their Manufacturing Brethren, Journalists Must Learn New Skills

The headlines from the front lines of newspaper journalism are unremittingly bleak. Baltimore Sun slashes 100 jobs. Modesto Bee cuts 80. Orlando Sentinel guts 20 percent of its newsroom. And those are just a few of the top items on Romenesko this morning.

There’s no question these are the toughest times the newspaper industry has ever witnessed. Papers everywhere are hemorrhaging circulation and ad revenue. Staff layoffs and buyouts are no longer occasional occurrences – they’re the norm.

It’s not yet clear whether newspapers will survive the current bloodletting. What's clear is that if they do, they will be very different entities, much more tied to the Web.

And what’s really, really clear is that reporters and editors, like their manufacturing brethren, must suck it up and learn the new skills required for this uncertain new age. To their credit, many journalists seem to understand this.

The Treehouse Media project, for instance, is organizing training sessions for journalists in the new skill sets: things like streaming video, podcasting, blogs and RSS feeds. Their website points out that while the Internet is sucking ad revenue and readers from print and broadcast news, it also gives traditional news outlets ways of displaying content that are impossible in print. On example: unlimited news holes.

Their website also gives an example of someone who may be the model for the next generation of journalists everywhere: David Pogue, personal technology columnist for The New York Times, who “has created a small empire." In addition to his work for the Times, which includes print and e-mail columns and an online video each week, he has penned a line of computer books, is a correspondent for CBS News and a regular on CNBC.

In this brave new world, journalists are going to have to become independent, or at least semi-independent, entrepreneurs, using the Web to tell their stories on their own, employing the rich array of multimedia resources available. And when many more journalists are plying their trade on the Web, on their own, it seems inevitable that the line dividing professional journalists and citizen journalists will become blurred.