Cyber-wannabe-journalist

Cyberjournalism may not be the trendiest catch phrase in the Malaysian media, but there is no short of multimedia elements in delivering news and images to our global audiences.

Starting out as a rookie, I've always acknowledged the importance of staying multi-skilled, to be able to write, report on air and package news items, in order to stay marketable in this fast changing environment. But I didn't acknowledge the speed of this development. A recent coverage of the Umno General Assembly jolted me back into the reality of this situation and the fluidity of mediums.

During the coverage of this political event, the colleagues that we had to work with from various mediums ballooned over the years, with many equipped with digital cameras, handheld camers and some also using camera phones to document the event for audiences. Even the political figures expressed their surprise, uttering remarks like, "wow there are so many of you there this year" and the like. Journalists turning photographers and camera men and women, and vice versa. And what has sped up this development, is as we know it,our far reaching medium, the Internet.

I use the word jolted because during the coverage, we were pushing each other to snap photos and record comments and this makes me realise how important it is to have multimedia skills.

At The Star, the idea of multimedia journalism was mooted more than 10 years ago, with the setting up of Star Online, our electronic version of the newspapers. About six years ago (or maybe further back), the company's multimedia section was set up, feeding content for mobile phone subscribers and later a video section to produce clips for webcasting.

Today, this humble multimedia section has grown from a 4 man team into team of 10 or more personnel, tasked to gather material for the online version of the publication. But it does not stop there. Journalists from all the different sections are expected to be ready to write scripts fo webcast and our sister radio station, Red FM, some are also trained to do stand-uppers and package stories for webcast.

Journalists are also expected to be able to put together news flashes for our mobile phone subscribers and also to upload on the news website. All this happened in the last five years,from my observation that is. Yes, The Star is embarking heavily multimedia aspect of journalism, in fact the publication now has a studio for audio and visual recordings of events.

The infrastructure is there, with the emphasis on the importance of serving different audiences' demands, but I feel that the publication needs to find tune its directions and objectives as a content provider in this changing environment.