David Dunkley Gyimah will be one of the speakers at the 15th World Editors Forum of the World Association of Newspapers in June. Last year the event in Cape Town attracted around four hundred editors.

For David, nothing is more important in journalism than training. He says, “like most news rooms you just got on with it - de facto training on the job.” Now, he points out, the journalism profession is changing, so the training must change also. On training today he says the following:

“The buzz word at the moment is multimedia, a discipline that pulls in a wide facet of journalistic talents nominally spread amongst a team.”

“We're in the evolving era of jack of all trades and masters of them all.”

“We will still need specialists, journalists who have no need to master these things, but the trend suggest a collapsing of interdisciplines into one.”

He says that after attending the Press Association's (PA's) Videojournalism training session he realized that print journalists could learn TV.

“Now print journalists shoot, cut, edit, voice their reports and we're training them to do it swiftly and produce appropriate visuals for their chosen platform.”

“Video online can either using one person be video journalism for television of video journalism for video journalism - the creative gonzo form.”

Dunkley Gyimah says “However one of the biggest tasks besetting training…is not necessarily the technical and theoretical skills we need to learn, but the paradigm and creative bent that is required to comprehend changes; changes which don't look like slowing down.”

Many journalists need to change the way that they think, and that is what makes training so crucial now.

Now “Journalists are having to think like graphic designers, motion graphic artists, action scripters, SEO analysts and as they slay one form, within the core disciplines the experts are raising their anti.”

Why does training more matter, according to Dunkley Gyimah? Here is what he says:

Training matters because it's about progress, not the fag end of budgetary expenses.

Because there is no certainty for those who remain complacent.

Big companies can and most likely will conceivably go to the wall if they don't change.

Doing nothing now is no longer an option - hoping this thing called the web will blow away.

We (more so in developed countries) occupy one big mother board so if you're not innovating, someone else will and your CEO will have no excuse to shareholders when that tech company down the road launches the next big journalistic tool that you should have had.

He says there is never such a thing as over training. And that “Training matters because without it we become anemic, we atrophy, we become bored at what we're presented with and if not industrious we fall behind our competitors whom today are world wide. To coin an old phrase demo or die, train or be slain. The choice is yours.”

Source: The Outernet - Integrated Multimedia VideoJournalism through Ifra Executive News Service