Journalists must acquire new skills but they must retain the skills they already have. Most importantly, they must convince a sceptical public that they deserve to be listened to, read and watched. They need to be trusted. These were the central messages to emerge from speakers at the opening afternoon session at the Society of Editors conference.
From John Meehan, editor of the Hull Daily Mail, Brien Beharrell, editorial director of the Newbury Weekly News group and Joanne Butcher, chief executive of the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ), came the same story. Multi-platform journalism is the norm and journalists must be trained in a variety of media skills in order to provide a range of content. Indeed, they're already doing so, thinking multi-media and acting multi-media.
Meehan told delegates of his paper's 30 video journalists and some of them appeared in a video clip to say how exciting they found it to meet instant deadlines throughout the day. They enjoyed the flexibility and and had embraced open-mindedness. As Meehan said, it is "less about skills than about attitude". In other words, it's a human thing not a technology thing.
Beharrell agreed, proudly claiming that journalists on her small paid-for weekly paper have already achieved convergence. And that's some achievement for an independent, family-owned group that finally embraced the 21st century as recently as January 2005 by converting to a tabloid format. Months later came a website and that has gradually been improved to include video and audio material. To illustrate how valuable this facility is, she told about the website broadcast of CCTV footage - shown as a matter of public interest - which showed a person being brutally attacked in the town. So the Newbury Weekly News (circ. 24,613) now has a newsroom in which every one of the editorial staff is now a multi-skilled journalist.
But Kevin Marsh, editor-in-chief of the BBC College of Journalism, while acknowledging that the old order has passed and that multi-skilling must become the norm, took the argument much further by asking profound questions about the point of being a journalist. He argued that anyone can acquire the skills to write, film and record stories, and to upload that material on to the web. The more important matter was about journalists regaining - or should that be winning for the first time? - the trust of the people. "Make no mistake," he said, "without a justification - an ethical justification - that feels very much like the self-discipline of a profession, future journalists will find it progressively harder to distinguish themselves from the ordinary citizen with a blog and a podcast".
Now that's really putting it up to us. Marsh is, in effect, challenging the very reason for the existence of a person called a journalist. His argument, in effect, is that all journalists really sell is "trust" and, logically therefore, unless people do trust journalists there's no point to us. So there it is. We can learn to podcast and vodcast, we can take notes in 120wpm shorthand, we can learn the Contempt of Court Act by heart, but unless we win the trust of the public as credible mediators, we will not be of any further use to the people we affect to serve. And, like newsprint itself, we will gradually end up in the dustbin of history.
