Month: August 2011

Tweeting a job application

You already know that prospective employers are looking for journalists with social media skills. The Statesman-Journal in Salem, Oregon, certainly is. Executive Editor Bill Church recently advertised an opening for a “talented reporter with high digital IQ.” If you’re talented,…

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More skills journalists need

For all the emphasis on multimedia and technology in today’s newsrooms, the basics are just as important as ever. That’s what journalism professor Laura Smith concluded after spending a month this summer working at KXAN-TV in Austin, Texas. In a…

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Log your way to better broadcast writing

The Murrow Award for writing “demonstrates excellence in writing that conveys the feeling and significance of events to the listener or viewer.”  That’s the goal of great storytelling, isn’t it?  To help make the news matter. Last year’s national winner…

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Journalism grads wish they had more Web skills

The annual survey of journalism and mass communications graduates finds that most grads are using the Web skills they’ve learned in school and wishing they had more. The majority of 2010 bachelor’s degree recipients said they had the skill when…

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Read the whole report

Sometimes the best advice is the simplest. At a recent conference of public radio news directors, NPR investigative reporter Daniel Zwerdling put it simply. “Read the whole report,” he said, quoting the legendary journalist I. F. (Izzy) Stone. The executive…

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What next for TV and social media?

The latest RTDNA/Hofstra survey finds that more than two thirds of TV newsrooms have a Facebook page and more than a third describe themselves as “constantly” using Twitter. As we did last year, we asked what stations were doing with…

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Digital verification tools

Information travels so fast these days that it’s hard to keep track of where it came from. Technology makes plagiarism and deception a snap. Online text can be copied and pasted in seconds, photos can be manipulated and no one…

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