Technology changes, people don't

I just got a few paragraphs into this article but it felt a bit like de ja vu so I closed the browser and came here, to Blogger, instead. This particular article was inspired by a mashable article and talks about 'the journalist of the future'. According to the article, this journalist will need to be a programmer, designer, editor and writer ... along with a host of other skills.

Why?

Why would future journalists need to be able to do all of these things? Why would future journalists need to do anything more than research and report? After all, isn't that the definition of a journalist? Current (or previous) generation journalists don't print the paper themselves, don't deliver it, don't market it, don't design it etc.

Maybe the standard of news these days relates to this idea .... that journalists are spending their time learning about elements of someone else's job rather than focusing on their own.

New technology doesn't mean that a single person will need to do all aspects of a job. Sure, it may help a journalist to know how to edit a video and upload this to the Internet but with software and content management systems this doesn't require quite the skill set exaggerated in the article.

Learning these new skills is no different to previous generations of journalists who had to learn to use tape recorders, type writers, computers and the Internet. It is the responsibility of the journalist to learn to use the tools required to transfer the information they are required to find.