Patrick Beeson

Traditional skills still rule among online journalists working in North Carolina newsrooms.

No, we haven't time-warped to 2005. Rather this statement is the result of a study currently being conducted by Ryan Thornburg, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Thornburg also found that most online journalists skew young, with most having less than 10 years of experience. And the majority, 82 percent, have at least an undergraduate degree with 19 percent having post-graduate education.

I've never worked in a North Carolina newsroom. But I did get most of my post-graduate online journalism experience working for The Roanoke Times/roanoke.com.

So how does Thornburg's findings compare to my own skill set while working as a young online journalist?

What I came in with

I began working at roanoke.com with experience managing a national-award winning, student-run news Web site at the University of Alabama called Dateline Alabama. I'd also finished an internship involving daily reporting for a national magazine Web site as well as various freelance projects.

This provided me the following skills:

• Management
• Copy editing
• News judgment
• Writing and reporting
• Photo editing
• HTML
• Content management system (CMS)
• Blogging

And because Dateline Alabama wasn't tied to a print product, I never picked up any of the legacy skills that are quickly becoming obsolete.

Compare this with the expert/proficient skills in Thornburg's findings:

• News judgment
• Grammar and style
• Writing summary content
• CMS
• Web usability (I have a hard time believing this one given most newspaper Web sites' poor design)
• Blogging tools

The funny thing is, I didn't know HTML that well going into my position as online producer in Roanoke. Sure I knew the basics -- enough to markup a story in a CMS -- though not nearly the same level as today.

Also, just knowing how to use a CMS was a great selling point for getting that job. We used the same CMS in Tuscaloosa as did many of the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group (Saxotech). Dateline Alabama had partnered with The Tuscaloosa News for that privilege.

What I learned along the way

I learned quickly that you can't innovate on the Web without learning new skills.

At the time (summer 2005), many newspapers were just awakening to the fact that their futures were on the Web. The market was still good, and print ruled most of the decision making process.

But roanoke.com was not your typical news-gathering operation.

The publisher, editor and managing editor at the time were all very much in favor of pushing resources around for the future. This, and the hard work of the online team, is what earned them the resulting slew of awards.

It was during this time that I began to question why we did certain things on the Web site. Why are we using tables and font tags? Why did we do so much repetitive coding on a daily basis?

So I picked up a book on CSS called "Designing with Web Standards" by Jeffery Zeldman. And it changed my outlook on what was possible online.

I learned why nearly everything I was doing was wrong, and how to make it better. Since I never bothered to invest much in the old ways of Web design, with those tables and font tags, I took to Standards quickly; I ended up teaching my findings to our online staff.

They probably still hate me for that.

My learning didn't stop with CSS and proper markup. I also started the blogging initiative for roanoke.com, including installing my first CMS (Movable Type) and integrating it into the existing site design.

The blogging effort also let me put to use my graduate project involving blogging and the media by teaching reporters and editors the "right" way to blog.

From blogs came multimedia and the huge resources that went into producing amazing acts of journalism with interactive Flash, audio (podcasts), video (webcasts) and customized CMS-driven Web sites.

Here's what I left the newsroom with (in addition to my previous skills):

• Basic Flash
• Audio recording and editing
• Video capturing and editing
• Web design
• Basic system administration
• Standards based HTML
• CSS
• XML
• DOM scripting
• Search engine optimization
• Web usability and accessibility
• Photoshop
• Soundslides

Comparison

I'll be the first to admit that I wasn't your ordinary online journalist. I have a passion for the work that I do, which I feel separates me from folks that just come into work for a paycheck.

That passion pushed me to accumulate the skills and experience that it appears the average online journalist in North Carolina (in 2008) lacks.

Of course, Thornburg points out that most of the duties performed by these journalists are reporting and copy editing. This raises the question of whether the right skills are being sought:

Thornburg asks:

We’ve seen this dominance of journalistic tradition now in job titles, skills and duties. Where’s the techtonic shift in newsrooms? Where are the mad scientists? The computer geeks? The innovation invasion?

Unfortunately, the "computer geeks" are not in Thornburg's bunch as programming and SQL are the lowest reported skills (majority "unfamiliar") for participants in this study.

Fellow journalism academic Mindy McAdams points out that these are simply the skills the online journalists surveyed currently possess, and not what may be actually needed. I agree with this point.

Though I moved away from the newsroom in my past two positions -- Web standards developer and project manager -- I don't think it unreasonable to expect new hires with my skill set. And yes, it's still OK to major in journalism.

Much of the problem, as McAdams and Thornburg suggest, are likely due to the shifting of bodies from print to online without putting the necessary emphasis on training. The recent barrage of layoffs seems to confirm the need to do more with less.

I think there will come a tipping point in the newspaper business were enough of the old guard leaves, and is filled with the new: A generation of journalists that needs no prename of "print" or "online" to recognize, collect, filter and disseminate information relevant to their audience.