“We’ve built an infrastructure around breaking news,” says Mr DeRienzo.

To help ensure employees have the necessary skills for to execute their new strategy, he says they have created a “digital ninja school” for all newsroom staff.

Mr DeRienzo says there are 5 key competencies:

• Pay employees to succeed at training
• Force managers to make time for training
• Measured by evidence of application to job
• Obsessively tied to and teaching metrics
• So hokey that it can’t be ignored as another boring bureaucratic program that will just go away

In keeping with the ninja idea, the company has come up with five “belt” levels that are also tied to monetary rewards.

The belts and their corresponding financial rewards are:

• White – $100
• Yellow – $200
• Orange – $300
• Green – $400
• Black Belt – $1000

Mr DeRienzo says one requirement is that previous belts must be maintained (i.e. if a reporter earns a white belt by doing regular blog posts, they must continue doing blog posts when they move to the yellow belt stage).

The conference, which drew editors from around the world to Hamburg, continues Thursday and Friday. The conference programme can be found at http://www.wan-ifra.org/events/11th-international-newsroom-summit.

Al Jazeera has launched a video campaign to teach people how to use Twitter and Facebook, with the ultimate aim of empowering them as citizen journalists.

The Qatar-based news organisation has started a new YouTube Channel named Al Jazeera Unplugged to distribute videos, teaching users the basics of social networking. 

For the moment, the information is very basic indeed. “Twitter is a website where people can send and receive ultra-short messages called Tweets,” begins one clip.

Users might question the wisdom of running an educational campaign about how to use social media on a social media platform – surely most people who are on YouTube already know how to use Facebook?

Being a war correspondent is a dangerous job. Yet that doesn't deter avid young journalists, eager for experience, from going out to conflict zones armed with an iPhone and not much else and trying to report on conflicts.

This has been a particularly bloody 12 months for journalists, with even experienced photojournalists such as Tim Heatherington and Chris Hondros killed in Misurata. Heatherington was quoted expressing concern about the number of young and untrained photographers covering the conflict in Libya this year.

This is where WARCO comes into play. WARCO is a gamed devised by Tom Maniaty, a senior lecturer in international journalism at the University of Technology Sydney and a former producer at the Australian Broadcasting Company. It is designed to simulate combat environments so that young journalists can at least have a glimpse into the work of a journalist in a conflict zone.

The game has similar format to any first person shooter, except instead of returning fire when attacked, the player can only raise a camera and attempt to shoot video. The clips the player records are then saved and then can be edited into news footage ready to be aired. The player is then assessed on whether their strategy needs improvement.

In the world of constant technological innovation, journalists report on new web tools and Internet phenomenon without really understanding the data behind it or who to contact for a better understanding.

According to Nicolas White, the co-founder and CEO of The Daily Dot, data skills are necessary to interpret the way the web works. Information is plentiful, but the ability to make sense of it all of it is not. As everyday brings a new flood of data and information, the Daily Dot advises publications to hire mathematicians to gather and understand information. Degrees in the humanities are not sufficient for deep insight into digital communities. White demonstrates The Daily Dot's commitment to this principle - the first hire of the self-proclaimed "hometown newspaper of the world wide web" was not only a journalist, but also a programmer.