Media Innovation, Professional Debate and Media Training: An European Analysis

Abstract

The media are in the focus of attention. Enabling digital information and communication technologies force the professional messengers to reorient themselves from monomedia journalistic outlets to multimedia information handling companies. Societies are growing more complex, with globalisation and localisation developing seemingly hand in hand. Media companies are at the same time converging and concentrating as well as becoming more specialised and differentiated. Such developments challenge the total of media output, the organisational structures, workflows, and working conditions of contemporary journalists. Consequently, the (further) training issue comes to the fore as an important instrument of facilitating and coping with change. This report focuses on the role of training, in particular further training, in this innovation process. The European Journalism Centre, in cooperation with The Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), undertook a project on describing the state of the art in further journalistic training and education in a number of European countries. Five countries were selected, based on their respective size and 'weight' of the media market: Austria, Denmark, The Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland.