Convergence and Essential Skills

Linda Kraxberger – Chair, Convergence, Missouri School of Journalism
Well, convergence journalism to us means working across media platforms, television, radio, what used to be called newspapers, but are now online media in many forms and it is also called at many other places, multimedia journalism. So sometimes when we think about journalism we think, you know, how would this story be told if it was on television and there's this certain sort of method of commercial broadcast and we—most of us have seen that and know what that is. But when the Internet came into existence when the World Wide Web came into being, all of a sudden, newspapers and radio stations, they had never really thought about video journalism before, had some new opportunities to tell stories in different ways and that kind of coming together is what we call convergence journalism.

George Kennedy
Now, you came to this, as I understand, from broadcast yourself; what differences have you encountered?

Linda Kraxberger
I think in the world of broadcast there is so much attention—it's a limited space in time. We have a half an hour and within a half an hour here's how much is out for commercials, here's how much is taken out for weather and sports and when we're telling stories online when we have that opportunity to do a story in an online format we're not limited to a minute and a half or a minute 15. Now, whether we're limited or not is different than what people's attention span is and there are a lot of differing opinions about how long somebody has attention for when it comes to a photo gallery or a photo slideshow or a video when they're viewing it online.

George Kennedy
We're talking to journalism students and future journalism students and so I suspect the question in many of their minds is if I'm going to succeed in this new converged world, what do I need to know?

Linda Kraxberger
Well, at the very least I think everyone needs to understand what makes a good visual, whether—what—we know our news consumers want what they want, when they want, how they want it and so some news consumers are looking at information on their cell phones. Some news consumers are looking at information online and some are still accessing it in some of the traditional forms that we've learned about for many, many years. And I think a beginning journalist needs to understand that some people will want to access material, they'll want to read about it, some people will want that material in a question and answer format and some people will want to ingest that as a video or as a slideshow or as a series of photographs.

George Kennedy
One thing you haven't mentioned I noticed is writing; is that still an important communication tool for the 21st century journalist?

Linda Kraxberger
Writing is absolutely critical no matter what medium that you're working in, whether you're working in radio or television or multimedia, writing is really—writing and reporting is really essential and it's the underpinnings of this. Even in visual journalism there is still some component of it that's written, it might be in an abbreviated form and in fact, I like to compare it to poetry or haiku. It takes a long time to make something short, to make it concise and clear and understandable.

George Kennedy
Is every journalist these days a convergent journalist?

Linda Kraxberger
Well, I think there are many journalists out there who would say yes. I would say that even though everyone should have an understanding of all these things and even though entry-level employers demand that people have more than one skill set, I think every journalist will have one thing that they are better at than the other things. I compare it to gymnasts in the Olympics. There's somebody who is great at every event in the Olympics and there are some in gymnastics and there are some who specialize in the balance beam or specialize on the floor exercises. And so in journalism, just like in the Olympics, which is what we do, hard, challenging, training, just like that I think everyone has to work on all the things so they can do them if they have to if somebody breaks their leg or sprains their ankle, but in other cases they are going to be the specialist in one thing.

George Kennedy
Great. Linda, thank you very much.

Linda Kraxberger
Thank you George.