J-school grads are mastering digital news skills, freelancers should too

Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia Journalism School gave the commencement address at the college’s 2008 graduation ceremony on May 21. It’s interesting reading for freelance writers contemplating where they fit into the increasingly digital world of news gathering and writing.

As Lemann’s address makes clear, this year’s crop of journalism graduates is leaving school with 21st century skills that reporters even five years ahead of them didn’t pick up during their academic careers. Lemann also points out that because graduates are so well prepared, a lot more are headed straight into good jobs, even if fewer of those jobs are in traditional daily print newspapers:

Today, more of you have definite plans that entail paid employment in journalism than had such plans when I first stood at this podium five years ago. How can that be? Much of the credit is due to the great work our Career Services office does, but it’s also that employers want you because you’re energetic, because you have skills that people already in newsrooms don’t have, and perhaps also because you aren’t so wedded to doing things the way they’ve always been done in journalism.

As I’ve written before in posts like this, this and this, if freelance writers want to remain competitive in today’s writing marketplace, they must adapt, and that means learning some of the skills these graduates picked up in school: multimedia reporting, photography, videography, blogging, Web tools and the like. You can’t pretend these things don’t matter. They do, and if you think otherwise, pretty soon you’ll be the one that doesn’t matter.

Read the entire transcript of Lemann’s commencement address here.