#wmf: Journalists need better technology training and careers advice, say training experts

Journalism training should educate journalists in social media and numeracy and give better careers advice, a panel of leading figures from journalism training said today.

Speaking at the Westminster Media Forum's The Future of News Media event, Tony Johnston, head of training at the Press Association, said working journalists and trainees will require "a much greater level of technology training" in the future than they have received previously.

"The effective journalists of tomorrow will have the skills to build extensive social networks that will effectively become their eyes and ears, alerting them to stories and information that the journalist will be able to verify and fact-check adding value to the end product," he said.

Journalists need better training in numeracy and data - "ways for finding data, visualising it and mashing it", he added.

"We're going have to teach journalists to be much more entrepreneurial in their thought processes and in the way they approach content," said Johnston.

Journalism training bodies and schools must balance maintaining teaching standards of core skills, "while the outside is expanding and expanding", Jonathan Hewett, director of newspaper journalism at City University’s Graduate School of Journalism, said.

Referencing the Sunday Times article published earlier this week which painted a bleak picture of career paths to national newspapers in particular, Jim Latham, secretary of the Broadcast Journalism Training Council (BJTC) said such views need changing.

"We all know about the quality of careers advice for journalism and I think we all bear some responsibility (…) kids deserve a bit better in 2010. Those views that there's nothing new except technology and the old journalism will see you through are outdated," he said.

Speaking from the audience, Kate O'Connor, executive director of policy and development at training body Skillset, said students on journalism courses see them as vocational courses beyond an academic subject choice and as such advice on routes into the industry should be updated: "I would please for journalists to be a bit more thoughtful and robust about the kind of advice they give to journalists going into the industry."

Hinting at tensions between the BJTC and the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ), which formed a joint forum on journalism training with the Periodicals Training Council in 2008, Latham said joint discussions about journalism training would be ongoing. But he described a new NCTJ multimedia journalism qualification, which features a broadcast element, as "narrow and artificial". The converging lines between different media and the skills they require is one of the most significant practical problems facing a future single training body, he said.

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