Journalistic skills are professional abilities that help a journalist fulfil a professional role set by peers and society.
Landmark studies on how journalists view their role in society, such as the longitudinal research on U.S. journalists by Weaver and Wilhoit, identify at least four roles for journalists: informative disseminator, interpreter, adversary role and populist mobiliser. In the eyes of Western journalists and their audiences, the first two roles are the most legitimate ones.
In their role as an informative disseminator, journalists have to be able to provide factual information quickly to a large audience. They need to acquire the cognitive and technical skills to gather and verify information from different sources, to present clear, coherent information in words, image/illustration, sound and video and to overcome their own biases and accept their own mistakes in public. Other skills required for this role refer to working in large, collaborative teams and being able to find and interview sources with different backgrounds.
The interpretative / investigative role refers to providing analyses of complex issues, including national and international policies, and investigating claims of people and organisations in power. In this case, the cognitive skills required refer to an appreciation of public interest issues and the ability to search for competent sources, which are able to explain complicated problems in the language of the layperson. Further, journalists can use a large array of technical and digital tools to make content and data easier to access and understand by their public.
The adversarial journalist confronts government and big business and is actively interested in setting the public agenda. The journalistic skills required are related to gathering and verifying data from different sources, to mastering rhetoric and narrative but also to finding equilibrium and neutrality. More often than not, adversarial journalism may end up being accused of bias and attention-seeking, in order to monetize audience interests for hard news.
The populist mobiliser is linked to a more recent trend in journalism interested in motivating people to get involved and to express themselves, in pointing to possible solutions and in developing intellectual and cultural interests. Here, investigative and interpretative reporting is done alongside opinion writing and social media promotion of journalistic campaigns for public causes.
