(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
From the perspective of practice, media convergence is also reshaping the everyday
news production practices and the landscape of journalism in a variety of ways, as
Pavlik (2004:28) indicates, newsroom structure, journalistic practices and news
content are all evolving. On the other hand, news workers seem to accept that
convergence has played a significant part in their everyday practices. An online
survey of journalists and editors in newspapers and TV stations has shown that in the
age of media convergence, both editors and journalists agreed that there was a strong
need for the training of new professionals, who can conduct multiplatform production,
new technology, and computer-assisted reporting (Huang, et al., 2006).
It seems that of all the aspects of media convergence related to news workers’
everyday production practices, learning new skills and technological devices are one
of the critical issues for the media professionals. News workers in a convergent
newsroom are supposed to learn multiple skills in order to produce divergent content
(García Avilés & Carvajal, 2008). The ideal multi-skilled journalist, as Bromley
(1997) suggests, would be able to make news for any medium using various
technological tools, which are needed in every step in the process. Many news
workers working in a convergent newsroom have to re-skilled to meet the demands
from several media or multi-media content at once, and they have to become, using
Eric Klinenberg’s term - ‘flexible labours’ (2005:54).
In fact, for some journalists and editors, technology usages and the re-skilled process
triggered by media convergence may not a great deal of concern while some
technological devices (e.g. digital cameras and small video cameras) have been
widely used by news workers to date. According to Singer (2004), most news
professionals express that they can master technologies and deny being frustrated by
the technological aspects of convergence. In contrast, the lack of time and the increase
of workloads seem to be bigger challenges for news workers in a convergent
newsroom. For example, some print journalists express that in order to produce
multimedia content for the convergent media platform, they may have to work
following television duties, which means that they may not have time to talk with
their interviewees to get more details and make their stories better, which press
journalist usually do (Singer, 2004).
Furthermore, in a converged newsroom, journalists also have to cope with cultural
challenges between the original newsroom in which they were previously located and
the new convergent newsroom. Deuze (2008:103) points out that ‘media convergence
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