It’s a perennial question. What skills do journalism students need most to get a job today? As always, it depends on who you ask.
At NPR, executive producer Robert Garcia says it’s simple: Writing, writing, writing.
“If you can write, you’re miles ahead,” he told a group of journalism educators meeting in Washington, DC. Garcia says anyone wanting a job in journalism needs to be able to write short and long, for broadcast and for print. “They’re tandem skills,” he said. “If you have them, the world’s your oyster.”
Garcia learned to write at a young age. His father, who immigrated to the United States from Colombia, insisted that he write a paragraph on current events, five days a week. beginning when he was just 8 years old. If you didn’t start that young, you can catch up by writing now.
“Write every day,” Garcia advises. “Blogging is a great tool to develop the skills you need.”
NPR anchor Windsor Johnston says vocal skills are essential if you want to work in radio. “Pronunciation, enunciation, inflection, sounding conversational” all take work, she said. “Pay attention to what you’re reading. You wouldn’t read a Super Bowl victory story the same way as a plane crash.”
For Ron Elving, a senior editor at NPR who has also worked in print, three qualities make job applicants stand out: Personal integrity, listening skills and critical thinking. Journalism educators should teach students to question their presumptions, he said.
No one mentioned more technical skills, despite the findings of a report (PDF) two years ago by the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism that found news organizations want to hire “new kinds of journalists who combine coding, visual production and audience acquisition skills with traditional reporting competence and even a little entrepreneurial savvy.”
It wouldn’t hurt to know some of those things, but the sense of the NPR panel was that if you can’t write well or think clearly you’d better work on those skills first.
