Multimedia skills not valued by journalists

Journalists feel multimedia production is a manual skill not a tool that helps them tell a story.

This is the surprising find from Henrik Ornebring of the University of Oxford (pictured), giving a quick overview of his six-nation comparative study of journalism skills at the International Association for Media and Communications Research 2010 conference in Braga.

The three-year project, highlighted by Alfred Hermida, run from 2007 to 2010 covers the 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.

Without knowing more about Ornebring's methodology for his qualitative research, perhaps these findings can be taken with a pinch of salt, what with such a low response rate to the survey and with the online survey being non-representative.

Otherwise it seems the debate over the importance of multimedia is set to run for quite a while yet.