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.

Study: Online and Social media boosted coverage of General Election

The televised leaders’ debates may have been the main talking point of the 2010 General Election but a new study highlighted by journalism.co.uk suggests that mainstream coverage was “enriched” by the use of online and social media.

The report, 'UK election 2010: mainstream media and the role of the internet: how social and digital media affected the business of politics and journalism', written by the co-founder of the BBC News website Nic Newman is the result of interviews conducted with more than 20 journalists, political bloggers and founders of political websites.

In a release to mark today’s launch of the report, Newman states how the results show that Twitter in particular has become a "core communication tool" in political and media circles.

With more than 600 party political candidates using the service during the election, it became "an essential source of real-time information for journalists and politicians", he says.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) also conducted a survey of more than 200 18-24-year-olds, as part of the study, which suggested that "unprecedented levels of participation" with the general election were a result of increased social media coverage.

The use of social media tools by journalists and mainstream news sites, such as liveblogs and digital correspondents, "helped to amplify the impact of social media even further" on this age group, says the study.