Journalists seeking employment need to pay attention to essential skills media houses want from staff they want to employ.
Having the relevant certificates may just not be enough if you don’t have the enhanced skills outlined in current vacancies by media houses.
Even for journalists who have been long on the job, they need to review their skill sets and get more training to remain relevant.
Below are some of the requirements in an advert by The Punch and two other top media houses on Monday.
Qualifications: The ideal candidate must have at least three years of newsroom or journalism experience and at least a first degree. What’s more, the ideal candidate is:
- Fluent at using sources, documents, computer-assisted reporting and other journalistic tools to develop, report, write and produce exclusive, impactful stories and investigative projects.
- Generates strong story ideas that can lead the publication
- Research, develop, write and produce ground-breaking investigative content
- Can juggle stories and projects along with multiple timelines, demonstrating exceptional time-management skills.
- Effective at making public information requests, following up with agencies and mining the data to identify important stories.
- Collaborate with news managers to dig into the big story of the day for topical investigations that accentuate unique angles and exclusive content.
- Flexible and has experience working collaboratively within a newsroom.
- Someone who possesses excellent writing skills with an ability to think creatively about telling stories for the web.
- Create, research and write news and features through investigation and research
- Excellent at juggling long-term work with quick-turn projects as driven by the news cycle.
- Knowledgeable at conceptualizing and applying data visualization techniques.
- Able to meet deadlines, respond to editing and adapt to new work situations, people, ideas, procedures and organizational structures.
- Passionate about upholding solid journalism ethics and has a track record of making sound decisions.
- English proficiency is a must
- Strong writing and storytelling skills.