Alfred Hermida at Reportr.net has found a job description for a 21st century journalist:

A posting for an internship at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper and its website for a multimedia intern reads:

This new position is for a multidisciplined and flexible multimedia journalist who can generate and execute multimedia ideas. Ideal candidates will be able to hit the ground running and juggle all types of content and content mediums on deadline assignments. One day you’ll be shooting breaking news photos and transmitting live from the scene, the next day creating a Soundslide feature on a local music festival, the next day shooting video of a political rally for the presidential election.

The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, this week released the submissions made to his department on National Broadband Network regulatory issues and, as Alan Kohler points out at Business Spectator, every submission calls for the proposed fibre to the node network (FTTN) to be built and owned by a specialist network provider and not an integrated telco. In other words, not Telstra, at least in its present form.

BTW: I do find it odd that Kohler seemed to be suggesting that no one really needs speeds of more than 12 megabits per second (Mbps). I know it’s not about speed, but it is about capacity. In the UK a recent report to government made the point that economic benefits would accrue as faster networks - of say 100 Mbps - would allow more people to work from home and allow businesses to be more distributed.

The report said that a nation wired for high-speed broadband would also benefit socially. Lifelong learning programmes would be easier to support, flexible working would be more viable and social exclusion could be diminished.

Meanwhile, Stilgherrian has been looking at the final report of Australia 2020 Summit, and concludes that Australia’s “best and brightest” and “clueless” about the internet.

At the ABC this week we were lucky enough to have a visit from Mark Deuze, who talked about how media work roles and practices are being changed, primarily by the affordances of digitalisation.

Mark has a very good book out called Media Work, in which he explains and contextualises the changing nature of media work - what it’s like to work in the media today and how the organisation of work shapes the professional identity of media workers.

Mark frames his work primarily within Henry Jenkins‘ notion of convergence culture: an increasingly global phenomenon based on the new participatory relationships between audiences and their media, and between media workers and amateur content makers.

Mark points out that as convergence culture takes place on both sides of the media spectrum - production and consumption - then the distinctions between the traditional role players in the production of cultural content are dissolving. As the line between producers and users blurs, with content production and distribution being done in workplace and non-workplace contexts by anyone with a computer, a network connection and moderate digital literacy and as a part of their normal lives, then what will differentiate professional media workers from anyone else making content?

Not surprisingly, this shifting paradigm is producing a crisis of professional identity, even prompting some professionals to ponder if the work they do inside media organisations is even media work. An official from the UK journalists’ union said recently that “journalists are too often reduced to a cross between call-centre workers and data processors”.

You can hear more from Mark and from Henry Jenkins, as both spoke to Antony Funnell on Radio National’s Media Report.

Courtesy of Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing - notice of plans to develop a TV treatment of Matt Mason’s excellent book, The Pirate’s Dilemma, which explores the development and impact of open source culture and user-led innovation on the creation and distribution of cultural content. Here’s a sketch trailer of the thinking so far…

Just back from the CCI International Conference in Brisbane… There were many outstanding presentations from overseas luminaries such as Henry Jenkins, Susan Greenfield and Mark Deuze as well as from local presenters from academic, business, media, creative or public policy areas on aspects of value-creation in the context of creative industries and innovation.

It was a high-value event and Axel Bruns from QUT has done a fantastic job creating a blog record of proceedings.

The web saviness of ALP campaign managers paid off last November when the party ran the first effective online Australian political campaign. Tens of thousands of people made millions of visits to the Kevin 07 website and Rudd’s profiles at MySpace and Facebook, blogged about him, acted on regular online updates and so on.

The ALP counts the online campaign as a major source of its success, and believes the Liberal party failed to understand both the potential and the conventions of the web, so when it did get its leader online, it was in the gawkiest way.

During the US primary election, Barack Obama rocked his own shortcode, Twittered to supporters and even created his own social network. Major publications are crediting Obama’s embrace of digital innovation and social networking as key to his success this election season. Next Great Thing recaps the highlights:

Having started out as a site that aggregated news from around the web and featured bloggers from founder, Arian Huffington’s A-list friends, the US-based Huffington Post has since moved into original reporting and is now about to expand into local news coverage.

A former “right-winger” with a fascinatingly varied background of associations and relationships, Ariana Huffington has switched political sides and is now becoming a force in online publishing as her progressive website takes advantage of the increased political focus associated with the US presidential campaign and the general unease with the Bush administration.

Huffington talks about turning Huffington Post into a “newspaper”, and told the Guardian News & Media’s internal Future of Journalism conference that local news coverage will begin with with a site edited for the community of Chicago, which will be the first of a series of projects in “dozens of US cities”.

Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google, believes every killer application on the web — instant messaging, e-mail, blogging, photo-sharing — has succeeded because it helps people connect with one another. For Kraus, this means the internet has an inherently social character. Kevin Werbach asked Kraus if the web’s social character can be enhanced further.

(HT to Steve Yelvington)

From Jaco blog: While iPod ownership continues to soar, more than half of these consumers say they can connect these devices into their cars. It’s more proof that radio continues to fight a difficult “location war,” especially in its long-time bastion - the car.

Now that’s an audience! The BBC’s combined international news services attracted a global weekly audience of more than 233 million during 2007/8.

The BBC says its international-facing online news sites – which include bbcnews.com and bbcworldservice.co.uk – attracted 13 million weekly unique users.