COMPUTER SUPPORTED COLLABORATIVE WORK SKILLS FOR FUTURE JOURNALISTS

Digital Journalism has been growing steadily during the last years, thus introducing new trends and practices in Journalism Education. But Information and Communication Technology (ICT) advances require important changes in the traditional work environment. Nowadays, Journalism graduates are not only expected to be skilled in writing, editing and broadcasting but they should also be able to create, collaborate, edit, share and publish content using web technologies. The Journalism curriculum is needed to be enforced by the adoption of best practices on Convergence Journalism and training using media industry-centered educational patterns. Already online educational modules and digital tools have been included in the structure of Journalism courses. Web 2.0 technologies such as Blogs, Wikis, Social Media, and Cloud Technologies (that enhance collaborative work) aim to contribute to these requested changes as far as educational material is concerned and respond to the challenges of lifelong learning education.

However, there seems to be a gap between digital skills of journalists in theory and in practice. The development of the professional skills of journalists can only be achieved by raising awareness on the benefits of acquiring such digital skills. The importance of incorporating these user-oriented technologies in education in parallel with the support of professionals’ training is crucial. These “new media” workers will surely become more efficient in today’s media business processes. Furthermore, future journalists will become digital mentors for media companies. Hence, this could make it possible for media industry to integrate these technologies in the benefit of journalism job market. For example, the appearance of collaborative work environments in education (i.e.Microsoft365) could have a significant impact on the workflow process of Media organizations.

The current paper is focused on the study of Computer Supported Collaborative Work skills of undergraduate and post-graduate students in the Department of Journalism & Mass Media Communication in Greece. It also discusses the necessity of the introduction of Computer Supported Collaborative Work Systems in journalistic work processes (pre-production, production, post-production) and the educational needs of the future professionals in this field. The education and training of journalists on the Computer Supported Collaborative Work environments could effectively improve their working skills, thus supporting awareness and collaboration through technology.