Jobs in the Journalism World

Have you ever had somebody come up to you and say, " What are you doing? That career is not one you should be going into?"  Yeah, same here.  However, one may not realize the many opportunities journalism has to offer. With multimedia journalism expanding rapidly, more job field have been created.

In the book, "Journalism Next," by Mark Briggs, Briggs says, "New technology is continually being developed to make your journalism more meaningful to your audience. Why waste time longing for the old days, before the audience had so many claims on its attention? Better to spend the time exploring new opportunities--and you can do that by making sure you spend as little time as possible on mundane tasks such as e-mail and note taking."

A job like web production is a job where journalists have to have good editorial judgement and the ability to keep the website up-to-date, engaging and fresh.  For this job a journalists needs to be a detail-oriented person who can work closely with other people. For example, people in the editorial and sales departments. 

This job has a good amount of responsibilities: A journalist who is looking to work in web production has to know how to to upload editorial content; which includes stories, blogs, art and multimedia.  They will be able to edit and upload photos for galleries, and know how to design, manage and deliver e-mail HTML newsletters.

Qualifications that a journalist needs for web production are as follows: Must have experience with online publishing tools like Dreamweaver and Photoshop. One must know HTML, CSS, and HTML tables that are used in newsletters and eblast; and they must know standard internet protocols such as FTP (file transfer protocol.)

These qualifications mean that a journalist needs to know how to create, write, and keep an up-to-date website and/or blog. A journalist needs to know how to keep the reader engaged and know how to judge the content of the story.  A journalist must know their way around all different kinds of editing programs like Photoshop and Dreamweaver.
In the book, "Web Production for Writers and Journalists," Jason Whittaker, talks about useful and significant web production can be. On page two he says:

"The Web holds the promise of publishing and communication on a potentially global scale to anyone with access to a computer and online connection. Producing a website can be pleasurable in itself, developing technical,writing and design skills that culminate in well-crafted pages...At the same time, these skills--writing about interests and passions, creating graphics and laying out pages, programming scripts and interactive elements -are becoming more than ever at the start of a new century. Web production and management is becoming a career for more and more people rather than a hobby. As such,web producers need to understand the principles of how sites can work effectively and what abilities they need to develop for this new medium, both on a technical level and to communicate proficiently. "

I would want somebody with these skills to work at my news organization. Having a journalist know their way around a website and blog would be a good asset to a successful news organization.  Having a blog and/or a news website gives the organization a way to expand and get more viewers to read the articles that a new organization provides. I would want a person that has really good judgement on the story content as well as editorial judgement.

As of right now, I do not have all of the qualifications to qualify for this sort of job.  To be able to obtain a job like this I would need to take more journalism classes that revolve around multimedia journalism.  I would need to learn the skills to be able to editorially judge the content that is put in each story/blog post.  I would need to know my way around HTML, and learn the program eblast.  Knowing all this information would do wonders for a news organization.  It would give them the edge they need to receive more viewers and readers.
Technology is growing and growing and along with that journalism is changing to fit the means of these changes.