The British-based academic journal Journalism Education has published the findings of a research project in which J-School professor Aneurin Bosley explored the employment status of recent journalism school graduates, the use of various technologies and technical skills in Canadian newsrooms, and the views of newsroom leaders and young journalism grads about the actual and ideal application of new digital reporting tools in the working world.
Prof. Bosley’s findings were drawn from the responses of more than 100 Canadian newsroom managers and more than 100 recent Canadian journalism school graduates to a series of survey questions.
The respondents were asked about what skills young reporters should be equipped with coming out of journalism schools, what skills are most frequently employed in newsrooms, and a host of other questions.
The study, titled “Technology use in Canadian newsrooms: there’s social media and then everything else,” found that newsroom leaders make the most use — by far — of young journalists’ social media skills. Other kinds of technical know-how, including the ability to create data visualizations, maps and infographics, were considered important to possess amongst both groups surveyed, though opportunities to employ such skills were considerably less frequent than the use of social media tools for both newsgathering and news dissemination.
In other findings, a question probing the type of employment experienced by recent journalism school graduates produced encouraging results, with nearly twice as many reports of “full-time staff” jobs using some journalism skills than “freelance” work employing such skills. “Journalism educators,” the study noted, “may find it encouraging that the ‘full-time staff’ response was by far the most common.”
Prof. Bosley, who teaches courses in digital journalism and ethics, previously worked as an online editor at the Toronto Star. His study was published as lead article in the December issue of Journalism Education.
Thursday, March 19, 2020 in General, Journalism News
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