Henrik Ornebring of University of Oxford gave a quick overview of his six-nation comparative study of the skills of journalists at the IAMCR 2010 in Braga.
This is a three-year project, running from 2007 to 2010 and covering six countries: UK, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Poland and Estonia.
Ornebring conducted a non-representative online survey with 2,200 respondents and a response rate of 4.3%.
He also conducted qualitative research with 62 interviews of journalists.
Among the top skills rated by journalists were writing and working independently. In Italy, Poland and Estonia, networking was also considered a top skill.
As for the lowest skills, all journalists agreed that they did not need management skills.
But the biggest surprise was that multimedia production skills were not valued by journalists.
Journalists tended to see multimedia production as a manual skill rather than something that helps them tell a story.
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