The Digital Journalist

“Tech-Savvy” is an appellation that many journalists of my generation like to add to our career profiles.  We believe it serves to bolster our perception as being in tune with the trends of the profession. Apart from the ability to further job prospects,   being tech- savvy is also an admittance of the fact that technology is driving contents and the traditional way of doing journalism is gradually fading.

With the rate at which  smartphones and tablets  are becoming the primary access point for news and information, the new reality for journalists who want to earn a successful practice is to embrace the truth that digital has not only  come to stay- it is indeed the future.

In the light of recent development in the media space where news and its accompaniments are produced and then distributed through the internet, the theme for the 2015 Women in Journalism conference which is “Truth and objectivity in the Digital Age is” is apt for the time.

The reality for an aspiring digital journalist is that it is not enough to be categorized as a ‘print’ or ‘broadcast’ journalist alone.   Say in 10 years from now, the peg question for employment would be “are you a digital journalist? 

The internet has succeeded in breaking restriction in job descriptions; that is why we have presenters engaging their audience with clips on YouTube and Twitter while some print journalists have taken the game a notch higher by including Vlogs in the body of their stories since video is also gaining prominence among news consumers.

In a way, both print and broadcast journalists are relying on comments generated by their stories online to gauge the pulse of the public. So this makes for a unifying point-that is using multimedia platforms to tell our stories as against the concept of a sole medium which used to be the norm before the dawn of digital.

The digital journalist is that person who has studied trends and come to realise that continuous education on the job and self development are very critical to enhancing one's status as a leader in the media industry, hence the need to learn how to be tech-savvy.

Recently, I was privileged to be part of the 7 journalists trained by the Thomson Reuters Foundation in partnership with the United Nation Foundation on the coverage of the 17 new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This was an opportunity I got through Facebook. Opportunities like this abound for both print and broadcast journalists to advance since the internet does not only provide us with better avenues of telling our stories but also access to opportunities that can align us with the demand of the  new age.

Women in journalism stand at a great advantage if we are quick to embrace this reality and start thinking like computer scientists. Digital should not scare us, we cannot wish it away.  

-HO