How skills rate in television newsrooms: comparing attitudes between working journalists and broadcast journalism graduands

This paper reports on the next stage in an ongoing study of skill needs in mainstream television newsrooms. It focuses on attitudes to technology skills by comparing a sample of television journalists at major Australian networks with a cohort of final year broadcast journalism students. Each group was asked to rank in order of importance six skills or traits - five that had been identified in previous research as important to the hiring decisions of senior news managers along with the skill trait of 'technological fluency'. Both groups ' journalists and students - ranked 'technological fluency' on mean averages last behind story generation, news sense & passion for news, television writing, good general knowledge and voice & on camera presentation. They were also asked, in a separate question, to evaluate the importance of more than 40 different skills and traits to television - including four skills involving technological proficiency - by allocating a score of 1 to 5 to each skill on the list. Significantly, out of more than 40 possible choices, both groups independently gave the highest mean average score for importance to 'Ability to work well under deadline pressure'. Both groups ranked the four technology skills in the bottom half of the 40-plus skills list, mostly in the bottom quarter.