Technological Skills and New Professional Profiles: Present Challenges for Journalism

The paper aims at understanding the intersections between technology and the professional practices in some of the new trends in journalism that are using the new tools: multimedia journalism, immersive journalism, and data journalism. The great dilemma facing journalism when training new professionals--especially the youngest--is not the training in new technologies anymore. The main concern lies in taking advantage of their skills to create a new computational model while keeping the essence of journalism. There is a twofold objective: answering questions about which tools are being used to produce pieces of news, and which kind of knowledge is needed in the present century. Based on the review of reports from professional organizations and institutes, an exploratory research to 25 European and American journalists was developed. The authors selected three cases of study. The cases allowed the authors to conclude that the technology matrix is going to remain and that change and digital process is not turning back and demands to evolve and adapt to new dynamics of work in multidisciplinary teams where the debate between journalists and technologists must be ongoing. Different approaches nourish the double way of skills and competences in the profiles of the current technological journalist, which professionals perceive as a demand in the present ecosystem.