Monday, March 19, 2012

Transferable skills of the modern day journalist


Shot on the Ipad 2

He was the former BBC director of global news and an employee of theirs for 30 years.

Then two years ago he joined Edelman, described as the world's largest Public Relations Agency, with 63 offices and more than 4200 employees as global vice-chairman. In September, he becomes the director of the Centre for Journalism at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies.

For the doctorate study I have been pursuing, I have interviewed around 90 experts and game changers who point the way to a new horizon in communications, weighted by their experience.  I'm grateful to Richard as I am to all of those who have been generous with their time and been patient while I asked questions.

The future of journalism is a subject we keep coming back to, but its part of a wider debate on communications and the impact of society and culture.

The tools have been the enablers, but as Professor Brian Winston points out there exists a supervening neccessity to make do with the technology. If we did not have a penchant to communicate, to share, to become blase about our social axis, twitter would be redundant.

Now more so than ever, in this excerpt from Sambrook, the integrity of News and its transferable craft skills is called upon.Transferable because since every one is a publisher, clients can and do publish their own news.

But news comes with a number of codes about its probity. In Public Relations that's a soght after quality, as much as the art and what constitutes a story, which goes back to my doctorate study.

We face an ongoing collision of disciplines; the key is to understand the present, reconstitute that with the past, and be confident about the future, It's a great time to study the art of storytelling.