Sara Spangler from WMAR-TV in Baltimore visited our class yesterday to discuss her experiences as an assignment editor in the newsroom. The main message she had for us was if you want to be involved in news you have to be able to do all three facets – television, print, and Web – in order to be considered for most newsroom positions.

Her message really hit home with me considering I left my job as a television reporter in Salisbury to get back into school in order to hone my print and Web skills to go along with my television experiences. The station where I worked hadn’t put many resources into the Web and so I didn’t learn much about working with it.

Sara talked about “one-man-bands” being hired nowadays by most stations. That is, reporters who can shoot their own video and edit their own packages. Again, because I worked at a small station and in a small market I often had to do all of my own work. I not only shot my own video and edited it but I wrote my own stories for broadcast and for the Web as well as took pictures for the Web. I worked extensively with photoshop and fx deko.

It was interesting to hear Sara talk about how most of the layoffs at news organizations lately have been the older members of the workforce and not the younger employees who know more about new media and technology.