As a former BBC journalist now teaching multiplatform journalism in Canada, I am struck by the attitudes of students to new media.
Some embrace the potential wholeheartedly, while others are more circumspect. Mindy McAdams highlights this issue in a post about the response to an earlier entry about getting a job in journalism.
Some of the journalism students who commented on her post are harking back to the days of “congested newsrooms, telephones that ring off the hook, rough drafts bleeding red ink, dramatic editor-writer discrepencies”, as one of them put it.
This might be the romanticised notion perpetuated by Hollywood movies. But how often does Hollywood reflect reality accurately?
In any case, journalism students should be looking to gain the skills to survive in the newsrooms of the future, not the past.
We don’t know yet what those newsrooms are going to be like. But we can be sure that journalists will have to be multi-skilled and be able to work across multiple mediums.
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