'Tis the season of "ten best" lists, and we thought about posting our ten best "ten best" lists, but that seemed too ... ambitious. So we'll bring to the party instead this forward-looking list of "Ten Things Every Journalist Should Know in 2010," courtesy of Journalism.co.uk. Everyone's prognosticating these days, but this particular list has more weight of authority simply because last year's version, "Ten Things Every Journalist Should Know in 2009," turned out to be reliably prophetic, and still valid -- starting with using Twitter and RSS feeds for news gathering and community building. Since we cast our Oscar ballots with those who have strong track records in that department, we'll take the same tack here.
So here's the top of this year's updated list of what journalists need to learn.
1. How to monitor Twitter and other social media networks for breaking news or general conversations in your subject area using tools such as TweetDeck. Understand and use hashtags.Read the rest of the list here.
2. You are in control. Don’t become a slave to technology, make it your slave instead. You will need to develop strategies to cope with information overload – filter, filter, filter!
3. You are a curator. Like it or not, part of your role will eventually be to aggregate content (but not indiscriminately). You will need to gather, interpret and archive material from around the web using tools like Publish2, Delicious and StumbleUpon. As Publish2 puts it: “Help your readers get news from social media. More signal. Less noise.”
4. Your beat will be online and you will be the community builder. Creating communities and maintaining their attention will increasingly be down to the efforts of individual journalists; you may no longer be able to rely on your employer’s brand to attract reader loyalty in a fickle and rapidly changing online world (see 7).
5. Core journalistic skills are still crucial. You can acquire as many multimedia and programming skills as you want, but if you are unable to tell a story in an accurate and compelling way, no one will want to consume your content.
What's on your list of new skills and information to acquire in 2010?
Tip of the cybercap to Alltop.
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