Came across an interesting article over at Poynter about journalists changing media platforms. The piece is timely considering the most recent class speaker, Christina Pino-Marina, and her experience going from reporting for a newspaper to reporting for a Web site to creating video online.

The article “More Journalists Switching Platforms to Work Online” gives several accounts of people who moved from newspapers, TV or radio to producing work for the Web, often for a competitor in a different medium. It was interesting to see newspapers going after TV reporters to help the paper with its online offerings or vice versa.

I also found it interesting that the sources saw their switches as moving from one job in digital journalism to another digital journalism job and not as switching mediums.

Newspapers are apparently adopting multimedia storytelling quicker than other organizations. The article also mentioned that papers seem to have trouble with picking up video skills quickly, which was something Pino-Marina touched on during her appearance in class.

One of the sources made the point that journalists must have a broad range of skills — writing, audio and visual — because of the Web. I got the impression from the article that it’s fairly common for journalists in one medium to easily transition to another, but I wonder if that is the case. Does anyone know? Perhaps it will become more commonplace to make such transitions in the future as the demand grows for journalists to have a wide range of skills.