I’ve haven’t tried these, but I wanted to suggest a couple of adaptations to the time-honored tradition of having students write a story from a fact sheet. These might simulate the experience of a “multitasking newsroom.”

• While they are writing, send students questions about their story via text messaging while they are trying to write. The students must provide the correct factual response.
• Have students work on two stories at once. Both with the same deadline.
• Have each student write a story, but also have every three students share one computer on which each of the students must edit one audio clip (or scan a PDF or whatever) to go with the story.
• Give them a speech video to cover, but make them live-blog the speech while also taking notes to prepare for writing a traditional inverted-pyramid story upon the speech’s completion.

What do you think? Have you tried to incorporate multitasking into your class? Or, perhaps, is this complete against everything that a university education should provide? You thoughts are much obliged.

Oh, their presentation was very good. Russial’s research about newsroom technology and roles is always enlightening. But a blog post from Alfred Hermida (who, by the way, is the conference’s best tweeter @Hermida) picked up on the presentation’s use of the word “convergence” and made me realize how broad of a definition that word can have. Hermida’s headline was “AEJMC: Newsrooms slow to move toward convergence” and he goes on to report that “Russial concluded that job specialisation remained the dominant organizing principle, with editors prizing depth rather than breadth.”

On Twitter, the unfortunate headline has been in circulation. I say it’s unfortunate because I think it misrepresents Russial’s presentation in a way that the rest of the blog post does not. My impression was that Russial’s research found that convergence IS happening in newsrooms, but that it is happening at the organizational level rather than at the individual level. He didn’t address whether convergence was happening at the story level.

And if you had to read that last paragraph a few times, you know why I don’t like to use the word convergence.

That said, I think Russial is right about the level at which convergence is happening. His findings are supported by the paper that Ying Du and I presented at the same session and they are supported, too, by an earlier unpublished study I did of online journalists in North Carolina.

The North Carolina study found that, on average, online journalists say they have had nine different duties at least once in the last three months. More often than anything else, a respondent said he or she had five different duties. But it also found that not everyone is doing everything. There is specialization of “new media” skills.

And in the paper we presented yesterday, online journalists said that the concept most important to their job was “multitasking”. (Journalism instructors however, ranked multitasking as seventh out of 10 concept. Leading to the challenging question: How do you teach multitasking?)

I didn’t research this, but I suspect that photographers are also shooting video. Reporters are blogging. Designers are animating. Copyeditors are producing story packages in a CMS. It’s not convergence as much as it is metamorphosis. And we aren’t seeing caterpillars becoming ducks. Not surprisingly, we’re seeing caterpillars becoming butterflies.

There are some roles in the newsroom that AREN’T converging. In the North Carolina survey, journalists who write original stories for the Web, edit text for content, and work with databases tend to perform very few other tasks.

I don’t have enough data to support this, but I also suspect that role convergence is much more likely to take place at small news organizations while specialization (and diversity) of roles is more common at the largest news organizations. And because students tend to start at small organizations and later join large organizations, this distinction is important (if indeed true). Understanding it can help journalism educators better frame the choices they have when dealing with curriculum change.

So, what does that mean for journalism education and curriculum change? I think a few things:

• Every journalism student should have a basic introduction to a broad variety of skills – writing/editing, reporting, photography/design, computer programming/algorithmic thinking and law/ethics.
• Journalism students should become proficient in a particular set of concepts and skills that we some define as being similar.
• “New media” skills should be incorporated into core classes. That means squeezing audio-video information gathering into reporting and design classes. It means that every class should talk about using social media for gathering and distributing news. If there is a specific class in “social media” or “animated graphics” or even “magazine design” or “sports writing” they should be advanced courses that students take after getting a basic introduction to them in earlier classes.
• The purpose of incorporating new skills and concepts into core classes comes at a cost of spending less time on the traditional skills that are still so valuable. That’s why further specialization is so important.
• Journalism students should also have a broad education that introduces them to economics, art, history, science, politics and all the rest. And students should also specialize in a subject area. (Again, I suspect that as newspaper staffs shrink that the place where we’ll find the most convergence in beat assignments. At the same time, the brand disloyalty of the online news audience is promoting beat specialization and the development of new niche topical expertise.)
• The purpose of the broad-based core curriculum – and the reason for including “new media” skills and concepts into those course is to give journalism students the vocabulary and news judgment they need to collaborate with specialists.
• Finally, as Russial pointed out in his presentation, the adoption of newsroom technology has tended to follow a pattern. First, technology leads to automation. Journalists whose careers are built around their expertise in quickly and accurately performing a rote task and not around thinking creatively and critically will lose their jobs. But then, technology leads to specialization. As new tools become available not everyone can be equally skilled at each one.

Dealing with the unresolved debate over convergence or specialization was one of the biggest challenges of writing my textbook. I dealt with it in a way that supports the solution I’ve begun to outline here: we need both. How’s that for convergence?

Pew hired Princeton Survey Research Associations International to conduct its poll of 1,201 members of the Online News Association. They had a 24 percent response rate. I paid two grad students and an undergrad to help me survey 174 online journalists (mostly non-members of ONA). We had a 29 percent response rate.

But even more importantly, I think the survey we did here at UNC does a much better job showing us the future of news… which is bright if you dream of a future of inexperienced, homogeneous copyeditors shuffling text around a Web page.

Here’s the topline of the PEJ survey. Here’s the data from the UNC survey.

Perhaps the main difference between the two surveys is that I was interested in what journalists do, while the questions in the PEJ survey emphasized what journalists think.

What the UNC survey found was consistent with a lot of findings in my earlier survey of North Carolina’s online journalists and in the 2006 survey by C. Max Magee , working with Rich Gordon at Northwestern University:

• Online journalists say they have a high level of proficiency in traditional skills such as news judgment, grammar/style, their company’s content management system, writing headlines and blurbs. They also say they have a high level of proficiency with “Web usability.”
• They say they have a low level of proficiency in technical skills such as SQL, Flash, computer programming languages, and even Dreamweaver.
• They spend most of their time managing projects , writing and editing scripts
• They are 93 percent white.
• They work mostly with text and are mostly editors.
• A third have fewer than five years experience.

I’m particularly interested to see whether there’s a disconnect between the words that hiring managers use in their postings and the words that journalists themselves use to describe online news jobs. Also, job postings are an important “leading indicator” of changing duties and skills in the industry. My survey describes the present state of affairs, and it doesn’t do a good job predicting what the future will be or what hiring managers WANT the future to be.

• Can we come up with a somewhat standardized set of job titles and descriptions for online newsrooms circa 2008?
• Is there a way to look at newsrooms skills and organization structures to determine “the best” way to structure an online news operation?

Mindy McAdams smartly notes that this survey can only tell us about current job skills. It tells us nothing about what skills journalists might need in the future. She’s absolutely right on that point.

Patrick Beeson posted a fantastic rundown of the skills he had when he came out of school and the skills he learned along the way in Roanoke. He agrees with Mindy, that this predominance of traditional skills and duties may be because many online staffers are refugees/converts from the print side. But he also notes that there are a lot of young people in the survey, too. We need to look more closely at the interaction between age and skill sets.

I was interested to see that Steve Boris saw in the survey results evidence that “technology is a distraction [journalists] can do without.” My take on the results is somewhat different.

Kate Martin at the Skagit Valley Herald has begun to post some feedback, but we’re still waiting to hear more from her.

John Russial sent me some good comments that made me realize I had forgotten to give credit where credit is due. With his permission, here’s what John e-mailed me:

I’m not surprised by the findings that traditional skills are valued. That’s similar to what Max McGee, a grad student at Northwestern, found in an online survey of a wide range of online sites. His adviser, Rich Gordon, in commenting on the results, said that the skills Max found important were closest to copy editing skills. I also think that there probably is a difference between what the major sites want and can afford — more specialization (programmers, interface designers, etc.)–and what smaller operations need. It’s similar to wearing many hats at a small papers and wearing one at big ones.

One of the things I found last year in my national survey of online editors and print copy chiefs was that the top reason online stories were not copy edited was that editing would delay posting. That seems to be consistent with what you found about deadline skills–getting it fast vs. attention to detail.

My research assistant, Sara Peach, took a close look at the McGee/Gordon study to help me formulate some of the question choices in this survey. I was interested to see if their findings still held true. Looks like they do.

I also need to give credit to Chris Patterson, David Domingo and the authors of the chapters in Making Online News. It’s a good collection of ethnographic research in to online newsrooms.

None of these folks are responsible for the perception from at least one commenter that this study is “more like government propaganda than a legitimate study.” That commenter does make a good point — after all, any idiot with a blog can post something on the Internet.

One of the scholarship recipients, Brian Boyer, writes about his career prospects over at the MediaShift blog.

Listed below are the job titles he thinks are available to him. He’s most interested in becoming a “applications developer” or a “hacker journalist.” Are any of these jobs available in North Carolina?

• CMS developer
• CMS implementor
• Web producer
• Applications developer
• hunter, gatherer and data-miner
• visualizations developer
• new media translator
• hacker journalist

But with the average salary for a new graduate with a BS in computer science at nearly $60,000 and the average salary for a starting journalist at about $32,000, any programmer who takes a job in journalism is definitely worth his or her own story.

The good news is that many of them are telling their own stories. One of the most inspiring discoveries I’ve made in the last year is the number of very young journalists who have blogs that are generally bullish on the future of news.

A few of my favorites:

• Shannan Bowen, Wilmington Star-News, UNC grad, 2006. She wants to know how to avoid burn out and is looking to compile a list of innovative journalists that will inspire young people.
• Jessica DaSilva, University of Florida, 2009. Her post on the recent reorganization of the Tampa Tribune newsroom where she is interning elicited 213 comments on her blog as well as a firestorm of comment on other journalism blogs.
• Brian Boyer, Northwestern, MA expected in 2009. One of two programmers who got a full-ride to study journalism. He’s looking for the right job description.
• Ryan Sholin, San Jose State University, MS expected in 2008. Sholin is leading a growing movement among young (and older) journalists by exhorting them to declare their independence from the curmudgeon tribe.

If you’ve graduated from college in the last five years and turned down a higher salary to stay/become a journalist, please e-mail me. I’d like to examine your head interview you.

Also bringing up the rear of concepts that online journalists said were important to them: the ability to learn new technologies and awareness of new technologies.

And, interesting to note for those of us who teach students that it is more important to get it right than to get it first, the online journalists in my survey said that ability to work under time pressures was more important than attention to detail. As a group, they gave deadlines a higher average importance than details. As individuals, 63 percent of the respondents ranked time pressure more important than accuracy.

Oy vey.

At this point in my analysis, I have to conclude that one of two things is happening here:

1. EITHER There is wide disparity between the skills, duties and concepts that I personally think should be emphasized in online newsrooms and in the skills, duties and concepts that are perceived as the most prominent and/or important in actual online newsrooms at North Carolina newspapers.
2. OR This survey is totally FUBAR. Perhaps I asked the wrong questions of the wrong people.

To help me sort this out, I’m going to turn to a panel of experts — both in survey methodology and in online newsroom leadership. And, of course, your comments below are always helpful.

Average Rankings of Concepts

1. Time Pressure – 4.1
2. Multitasking – 4.3
3. Detail – 4.4
4. News judgment – 4.4
5. teamwork – 4.8
6. learn new tech – 5.8
7. web usability – 5.8
8. interpersonal communication – 6.0
9. aware new tech – 6.7
10. online community management – 7.3

( Respondents were asked to rate these concepts from 1 to 10, in order of most important to least important.)

Most Popular Priority Ranking for Each Concept

1 – Time pressure, news judgment
3 – teamwork, detail
5 – communication, usability
6 – multitasking
8 – learn new tech
9 – aware new tech
10 – comm. management

Thirty-nine journalists said they spent some of their time training others in the newsroom. That was the most popular duty among the 24 I asked about. Now, they aren’t spending a ton of time on training — only about 8 percent of their time — but the issue of mid-career training is a hot one among journalists these days. The case for more training and staff development is made best in the book News, Improved by Michele McLellan and Tim Porter.

One of the other most popular duties was “project management,” done at least once during the last three months by 32 journalists in the survey — although it too only took up about 8 percent of their time. This, however, is a duty that’s near and dear to my heart because that’s how I spent probably 50 percent of my time as a working online journalist.

Of course there are classes in pedagogy and in media management, but most journalism students never come near either one of those courses. And these aren’t the kinds of skills that are easy to condense in to a lesson and to measure in some gradable way. But they are duties with which we can gives students some experience in every one of our classes.

This semester, I’m going to try to infuse teaching and project management skills in to my classes in two ways:

1. Have students teach each other. Especially in my online journalism class where I’m giving students a shallow introduction to a wide variety of computer programs. I’m going to assign each program to a group of students and have them be the experts on it. Each student will be required to teach the rest of the class. Their incentive for teaching well? They will also be the on-call tech support for their classmates who have difficulty. My responsibility: being a resource that helps them learn how to teach.
2. More group project work. I’ll need to do enough small projects so each student has the experience playing the “management” role at least once.

From what I know, most of my colleagues are trying to do both of these things to at least some degree in each of their classes as well. It’s something to which we’ll have to pay attention and something that probably should more often be on the menu at conferences like ONA.

I would like to thank the Tampa Tribune for helping demonstrate the importance of knowing how newsrooms are organized — what skills, duties and concepts are held at different staff positions, and how those positions relate to each other.

The Tribune’s reorganization memo was posted to Romenesko yesterday. Thanks to Paul Jones for the tip.

Now, I’ve written more than my fair share of reorganization memos. All have been aimed at breaking down silos. Some have worked. Some haven’t. But all eventually create new silos. That’s because newsrooms, like nature, abhor a power vacuum. And someone always fills it.

In restructurings, there are always three important people:

• The person who has budgetary discretion.
• The person who makes the schedule.
• The person who has the power to hire and fire.

Sometimes those are three different people. Sometimes they’re the same person. But those folks have inherent tools that can make things happen — or not happen — in a newsroom. These people have what I call economic power — they control the important resources of time and money.

But that isn’t the only source of influence in a newsroom, especially an online newsroom. Perhaps the most influential people in an online newsroom over time are the people who can work laterally to collaborate with their peers. And this ability is largely a result of who has certain skills, and how many of those people have that skill. For example, if I’m the only Flash developer in my newsroom I’m calling the shots no matter how low I am in the org chart.

Well, at least in the short term. Over time, the person who has the ability to fire me can separate a skilled developer from his or her daily power, but that usually only comes after long conversations with other staff who are disgruntled that the developer isn’t working on his or her project. And only if the manager can determine whether the developer is sandbagging or whether he or she is really being asked to do more than is humanly possibly. But usually by that time, the developer — who has more career options than probably anyone in journalism — has decided to move on to another shop for more money or more (promised) autonomy.

That, my friends, is the power of the bottleneck in the online newsroom. And that’s just one of the reasons it’s important to survey folks about their skills, duties and responsibilities. The people who sit in positions of Bottleneck Power have the ability to move innovation quickly forward or to thwart even the best intentioned manager.

From the memo, I can’t tell where the position of Bottleneck Power resides within the Tampa newsroom, but I guarantee there is one.

My best wishes to my colleagues in Tampa on their reorganization. I look forward to watching how it will change the journalism they produce.

Many of them are spending time on duties that don’t have an immediate, direct effect on their Web site’s content. The task of training and teaching their colleagues is the duty that an online journalist is most likely to have performed at least once during the last three months.

As part of my survey of journalists who work online at North Carolina newspapers, I asked them to tell me what percentage of their time during the previous three months they spent on each of 24 duties. As a group, here’s how they spend most of their time:

• Writing Original Stories – 16%
• Other Duties – - 9%
• Editing Text for Content – 6%
• Project Management – 6%
• Blogging – 6%
• Photo/Image Editing – 6%
• Staff organization/administration – 5%
• Training or teaching other staff – 5%
• Writing headlines or blurbs – 4%
• Working on business issues – 4%

It’s worth noting that the group is spending its time on an incredibly wide variety of tasks. There is no one duty that dominates online journalism. In some ways, this backs up the perception that online journalism is dominated by “multitasking” or by “backpack journalists” who are the jacks of all trade and masters of none.

But when you look at the numbers a little more closely at individuals, it appears as if there is a group of online journalists whose days are dominated by “traditional” tasks and another group of people who are doing the “new media stuff.”

On average, online journalists say they have had nine different duties at least once in the last three months. More often than anything else, a respondent said he or she had five different duties. And we see a wide range of responses for each duty — some people do that task a lot and some don’t do it at all.

Three duties stand out with very high modes — writing original stories for the Web, editing text for content and database design and management. Those jobs dominate the work lives of the people who do them. Among people who said they write original stories, the journalists were most likely to say they spent 75 percent of their time on that task. For content editing, the mode was 30 percent of their time. And for database work, the mode was 20 percent of their time. The modes for all other duties were less than 10 percent.

The folks who write original stories are overrepresented among journalists who have fewer than 10 different duties. They make up 42 percent of that group while making up 26 percent of the total sample.

So while you’re more likely to find an online journalist writing an original story than doing anything else, “teaching others” is the duty that an online journalist is most likely to say that he or she has done during the last three months.

Here are the duties done by the highest number of online journalist in North Carolina:

• Training or teaching others in their newsroom: 39 journalists said they’d done this at least once during the last three months.
• Writing headlines or blurbs: 37 said they’d done this.
• Photo/image editing: 36 journalists.
• Editing text for content: 33.
• Project Management: 32.
• Editing for grammar/style: 32.

In don’t know about you, but this looks like a field that is dominated by people who are reporters and copyeditors. We’ve seen this dominance of journalistic tradition now in job titles, skills and duties. Where’s the techtonic shift in newsrooms? Where are the mad scientists? The computer geeks? The innovation invasion?

Did I not ask the right questions? Did I not survey the right people? Is it a result of “the Gannett effect“? Are these changes not happening at small and mid-market newspapers? Are they just not happening in North Carolina? Or is this whole thing just a myth perpetuated by snake oil salesmen?

Are those skills not valued by hiring managers? Or are they just skills that are in high demand but short supply?

Stay tuned, dear reader. Stay tuned.