Presentation held at the 2011 Future of Journalism conference.

1. JOURNALISTS’ MULTISKILLING IN THE DIGITAL AGE Maurice Vergeer Radboud University Nijmegen the Netherlands Alexander Pleijter University of Groningen the Netherlands Liesbeth Hermans Radboud University Nijmegen the Netherlands

2. Changes in the field Drastic changes in media industries increased media output Digitization the Internet Mergers Factors important for media industry changes: technological innovations economic pressures Professionalization Striving for increased quality

3. From convergence to multi-skilling Single mode news organizations transformed to multi-media organizations Converged news organizations affects journalism practice (Avilés & Carvajal, 2008) Different and more skills Production for several platforms simultaneously Production speed increases

4. Economicnecessity Decliningnumber of newspapersubscriptions “News is for free”

5. Consequences for journalists’ daily activities More production With less journalists At a much quicker rate Journalist transform from a specialist to generalist

6. Still… Empirical evidence is lacking Little research on multi-skilling Hardly any longitudinal research

7. Research Questions What type of activities do journalists carry out? To what degree have these activities increased or decreased over time, in general and specifically for different media types?

8. Data and measurements

9. Data Drawn from the membership database of the Dutch Journalism Association (NVJ). 2006 (N=643) and 2010 (N=1016) identical measurement instruments in both years

10. Measurements activities and media platforms, a matrix with one dimension all types of media platforms listed and the other dimension the media activities listed.

11. Media platforms Broadcasting Public service broadcasting Commercial broadcasting Regional public service broadcasting Local broadcasting

12. Media platforms Newspaper National newspapers Free dailies Regional newspapers Nondaily newspapers Free door-to-door newspapers

13. Media platforms Magazines News magazines Special interest magazines Professional magazines Corporate magazines Magazines for associations The Web Journalism websites and weblogs (unrelated to media that are traditionally offline)

14. Activities writing editing reporting coordinate photo´s/video presenting maintain website

15. Findings

16. Most performed activities

18. Number of activities performed

20. What activities have in- or decreased by media type

29. Conclusion Journalists perform multiple activities. About three to four activities Writing, editing and reporting In four years time there is been little change overall But, Considerable changes within different media types Multi-skilling is mostly performed on the web, but less in other media And even slightly decreasing for traditional media

30. Editing, presenting and reporting has decreased across media types Writing and recording videos and photographing has increased for selected media Maintaining a website has increased across all media

31. Future research What specific combinations of activities do journalists perform? To what extent is this related to personal and professional background (age, gender, professional education)?