Dilute skill at your own risk

Sarah Radford is an online journalist on the award-winning Newbury Today website. This means she is one very busy woman. She goes out reporting, conducting interviews whilst filming (and checking the sound is working) and wondering if she will have to write the story for the newspaper as well as the website.

Radford said she felt frustrated she wasn’t able to give things the time she would like because of restrictions of such multi-tasking. This echoes my post about Richards Burton’s reservations against requiring journalists to be so multi-skilled.

When asked if she saw members of an expanded team having more defined roles, such as including a dedicated cameraman, Radford said she didn’t think so. She envisioned simply having more people involved in reporting a story, but all of them being fully multi-talented.

I wonder if this is the case. If, as Radford says, the quality of journalism is affected by expectation for multi-tasking, once online news rooms are further established surely there will be a movement back towards specialisation? This might involve the integrated newsroom which Radford’s boss Martin Robertshaw discussed and which BBC News Interactive’s Pete Clifton talked about last week.

However, Robertshaw said that when the whole of the newsroom was multi-skilled, he would be a happy man. I wonder if, instead, we will see the integrated newsroom come to fruition by all areas of the media using their particular specialisations to complement each other and provide integrated news output - without compromising the quality of the journalism.