Journalistic Skills

JKW-students publish the first "Facets of Journalism" report

Throughout 2021, 16 JKW master students worked with Prof. Juliane Lischka to produce the first "Facets of Journalism" report. It presents an overview of skill demands, skill profiles, and working conditions of major news organizations in large media markets to understand the facets of journalistic skills in the digital age. For this study, we collected and analyzed 527 job ads of 17 established broadcast, print, online-only outlets from the USA, the United Kingdom and Germany over three months in the summer and fall of 2021. The results provide insights into employability for people who want to work in journalism and offer implications for journalism educators that train those who will shape the future of journalism. To download the full report, click here.

Some of the key findings are:

• News professionals need news-making and digital skills, even in strategy and tech-intense positions.
• Only one in four news professionals need audience orientation.
• Content production, content dissemination, and building data infrastructures are three distinct skill areas.
• The Editor job profile is most advertised, followed by Data Specialists.
• Salary is not transparent, potentially sustaining wage gaps.
• Workplace ethics are more often a topic in job ads of online-only than legacy news outlets.

Within the US, UK, and Germany, we selected two news outlets with the highest reach in the categories of broadcast legacy, print legacy, and online-only.

Work experience, communication skills, and news-making expertise are crucial for news professionals (Fig. 1.1). News outlets might not hire someone lacking digital skills, yet cross-media and social media skills are more special skills.

Job ads hardly ever provide explicit salary information (Fig. 3.3). Non-transparent salary and vague jargon enlarge the gender and ethnicity pay gap as well as impedes access to journalism.

The authors of the first "Facets of Journalism" report are Anna Kustermann, Vivien Ulm, Jelka Weyland, Duc Hai Le, Philine Klinger, Greta Kaiser, Leopold Pelizaeus, Jonas Freudenhammer, Lara Betz, Angela Nguyen, Mara Haber, Tabea Kirchner, Friederike Deichsler, Jonathan Deupmann, Annika Schultz, Hristo Lolovski, Nadja Schaetz, Laura Laugwitz & Juliane A. Lischka.