Journalism’s Core Skills: Is there really a gap?

This week you may be seeing a report or two about a gap between journalists’ and journalism educators’ thinking about the skills that are important for journalism’s future.  Caution: The gaps may appear larger than they really are.

The Poynter Institute’s study “Core Skills for the Future of Journalism” was released on Thursday (4/10/14), and I attended the accompanying webinar.

The survey, conducted in late 2013 and early 2014, involved 1,124 professional journalists and 996 journalism educators.  Respondents were selected from Poynter’s lists of folks who had taken courses from its NewsU training program.

According to the survey, these are the skills most highly valued by journalism educators (in order of importance):

* accuracy

* curiosity

* the ability to select reliable information

* the ability to use correct grammar

* acquaintance with journalistic ethics.

And lo: The top five list among the journalists was almost exactly the same.

What’s interesting to me in this data set is how many items on the list produced agreement between the professionals and educators, as to their relative importance.  On 29 of the 37 “skills” (some items are more attitudes than abilities) the two groups were within five “ranks” of each other.  On only three items did the two groups differ by double digits in their rankings:

* Mastery of interviewing techniques (educators ranked it 7^th,highest ,professionals 17^th)

* Ability to tell stories with design and visuals (educators ranked it 21^st, professionals 32^nd.)

* Ability to be a team player (educators ranked it 32^nd, professionals 16^th)

Other than those outliers, the similarity between the two lists is remarkable.  Accuracy, curiosity and the ability to use correct grammar are in both groups’ Top Four.   The ability to select reliable information, acquaintance with journalistic ethics, knowledge of current events, good news judgment, and ability to “network, make contacts and develop sources” made both groups’ Top Ten.

The items at the bottom?  Plenty of agreement there, too.  Each group’s lowest three had the same items: Knowledge of the business of media, ability to work with HTML or other computer languages, and “be a team leader.”

But the Poynter researchers presenting the webinar see mostly disturbing gaps  between journalists and educators. How is that possible?  I suspect an artifact of the survey process.  Respondents were presented with 37 different skills or attributes a journalist might possess and were asked to rate each item’s “importance to the future of journalism” on a scale of 1 to 5.  The Poynter researchers fixed their gaze on the gaps between approval ratings, if you will, of the educators versus the journalists.  For example, they note that 83 percent of educators rated “knowledge of government” as important, compared to only 69 percent of journalists according it importance.  Similar gaps occurred in the percentages throughout the findings.

But consider the world view of the educator, and that of the journalist.

The educator most likely thinks of an entire curriculum (and two or three years) in which to deliver a skill set, and the delivery of the skill set is very much a collective, full-faculty enterprise.  It’s only natural that an educator would be inclusive, and enthusiastically so, in according importance to all kinds of different journalistic skills.  And not knowing the look of journalism’s future, educators naturally would like to prepare students for anything and everything.

The journalist, on the other hand, most likely thinks of the skill set as something s/he and co-workers individually acquire.  Given the tight resources in the journalist’s working environment, the acquisition of a much broader swath of skills seems unlikely.  And declarations about the “mojo backpacker” notwithstanding, there is still quite a bit of high-quality, specialized work in journalism.  Add to that a dollop of social-desirability bias – educators not wanting to seem behind the times and journalists not wanting to seem overly enthusiastic about, well, anything – and we can logically expect the educators to check the “important” and “very important” boxes more often than the journalists, across the board.

I tested this hypothesis by figuring the average of “important” and “very important” ratings given by each group for all 37 items across the board.  Sure enough, the average frequency of “important/very important” ratings for all 37 items was 82 percent from the educators – and only 70 percent from the journalists.

Sometimes it makes sense to consider ordinal (rank-ordered) measures rather than percentage measures.  We see differences in the percentages giving importance to “knowledge of government,” but the rank-order of that item by each group was identical: It ranked 20th among the 37.

The Poynter researchers were especially concerned that the educators seemed to embrace the digital/multi-media skills more warmly than did the journalists.  For me, the bigger story is how few of those new-age items ranked highly with either group.  In each group’s Top 20 priorities, two lists that again were extremely similar, only two of the 20 could be associated with the digital age: Search for online information at an advanced level, and ability to embrace change and innovation.  The other 18 or so are enduring skills and values that have served journalists well for generations.

Yes, there are differences, and they’re worth discussing.  But our focus more properly belongs on the skills that both groups deem important (the very similar Top 15 from each group).  Let’s ask ourselves if both journalists and educators are focusing on an outdated set of skills (how seriously will correct grammar matter, for example, to the news audience of the future?).   Let’s ask whether other skills deserved to be included in this list.  And let’s ask ourselves if we’re giving journalists – present and future – adequate opportunity to achieve excellence in the skills that really seem to matter.

So here are the rankings.  The skills in bold are those where the educators and professionals disagreed by more than five “ranks.”