In Newsrooms, New Media Skills Augment Traditional Skills

Convergence or Replacement? Thornburg

Convergence or Replacement?How and Where New Media and Traditional Journalism Skills Meet in Newsrooms

Ryan ThornburgAssistant Professor School of Journalism and Mass CommunicationUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillMarch 20091

Convergence or Replacement? Thornburg

INTRODUCTION

The newspaper industry in the United States is undergoing a fundamental change that isaffecting the structure and composition of newsrooms. Newspaper circulation has declined everyyear since 1993 and overall circulation has been reduced to 1975 levels

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. More and moreAmericans are getting their news online, although the percentage who do so has flattened in thelast two years after a decade of rapid growth.

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Newspapers are adjusting to these trends by making changes in their newsrooms. Thechanges that seem to have received the most attention are the massive layoffs across the industry.At the newspapers with the 100 largest circulations, more than 6,300 employees lost their jobsthrough buyouts or layoffs between August 2007 and August 2008.

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According to a recentsurvey of editors, 59 percent of newspapers have reduced full-time newsroom staff over the lastthree years. More than half of the newspapers with circulations greater than 100,000 have cut between 10 and 19 percent of their newsroom staffs.

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On the other hand, newspapers are continuing to bolster their online staffs – or at leastholding the number of online staffers flat. In the same survey, 57 percent of editors said they’dincreased staff dedicated to “Web-only editing” over the last three years and 63 percent said their papers said they had more videographers. In fact, these are the only two job functions at which amajority of papers have added staff.Amid overall staff cuts and a refocusing of editorial resources to online functions,newspapers have primarily three options for meeting these two objectives – they can completelyre-define the jobs of employees so that they are working entirely for the Web site, they can addonline duties to the existing print responsibilities of traditionally trained journalists, or they canhire new staff that already have skills such as videography and Web-only editing.2

Convergence or Replacement? ThornburgFor at least the last 15 years, newspaper industry groups have bemoaned the lack of investment that newspaper companies put in to training their employees.

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While the nationalaverage of training investment across all industries is 2.3 percent of payroll, newspapers spend0.4 percent of payroll on training.

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With such a comparatively low rate of investment in training – and trend that existedeven before online publishing became a widespread force in the news industry – newspapers areleft to obtain new media skills from college students entering the work force for the first time. Atleast one survey seems to indicate that these recent graduates are doing more and more work online, and that recent journalism graduates working online are paid more than their peers. Two-thirds of people who were working full-time at daily newspapers and had received a bachelor’sdegree in journalism in 2007 are writing or editing for the Web.

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The average salary, accordingto the same survey, of a 2007 graduate working online was $37,400, compared to $30,000 for all2007 journalism graduates. And the demand for young journalists to write and edit for the Webis growing. In the 2004 survey of graduates, only 22.6 percent said they were doing that task.

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This demand for new skills – and the expectation that newsrooms will acquire these newskills through the hiring of young staff – is evident in the quote from one editor in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s survey about the changing newsroom. When asked to cite thenewsroom change that most contributed to his or her ability to be competitive, one anonymouseditor said, “New young reporters and editors who bring new skills and outlooks to those whohave been here a long time.”

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Journalism schools have been responding to this expectation for at least the last decade.From 1998 to 2002, about 60 percent of U.S. journalism schools redesigned their curricula or developed new courses to prepare students for producing news in multiple media.

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An October 3