Hannah Waldram, community coordinator, news, the Guardian
Drop the snobbery around engaging readers: We don't need to continually get hung up about things like members of the general public contributing to the storytelling process (or the loathed term 'citizen journalism') – the sooner young journalists can dismiss any snobbery to do with engaging readers, the closer they will be to looking like a journalist of the future.Learn to report in the field and on the fly: I was recently covering the English Defence League protest in the city centre – I was live tweeting, using Audioboo to get short clip interviews with the police, using Bambuser to live stream some video when the protesters broke the police line, while also taking still video on a Kodak HD camera which I knew I could edit and upload later using iMovie and Youtube.
I took pictures on my phone and sent them out on Twitter using twitpic and I was also taking notes using shorthand in a notebook so that I had some extra quotes to write up in a more considered report later – I carried my laptop in a rucksack on my back and cycled to the nearest place with Wi-Fi to upload anything I couldn't do live. There I'd also write up a couple of pieces while responding to comments, looking for reaction tweets, videos, confirming numbers with the police and so on.
I soon learned to carry everything I needed on my back, and made sure I had pockets (like gadget girl!) to keep all my phones and cameras in. I also learned to make sure everything was fully charged before leaving the house and I knew where the nearest Wi-Fi was – this type of training you can only learn on the job.
Always have a pen!
Make friends with hyperlocal journalists: Don't contend with them, work with them! Go out and meet your hyperlocal friends, have drinks with them and talk about any local issues – they're not decreasing the value of journalism but enriching it. The sooner you understand why the better a journalist you'll be.
Nick Petrie, social media and campaigns editor, the Times
Community journalism will be very important: Considering the rate at which publications are hiring people to help develop and serve their communities, it is going to become increasingly more important. Look at Liz Heron's recent move to the Wall Street Journal with Neil Mann, that the New York Times is looking for three social media producers and that the Guardian has a whole suit of community coordinators.In an age where readers are not loyal to one paper in the way they used to be, developing and maintaining a relationship with readers (engaging them) is key to them coming back – the community aspects of journalism are not a hobby or a passing fad.
Battery backup is your friend: My major fears when it comes to tools are a lack of serious advances in battery tech; every good mobile journalism tool kit includes various charging cables and backup batteries. I need an iPhone that can do seven days heavy use – at the moment it dies by midday if I have a busy morning.
Call yourself a journalist: Not a student journalist, and then act like it – don't wait for permission to get started, just start writing, blogging, interviewing, taking photos and so on.
Experiment: So many projects you can try are cost-free and low risk. People think journalism is only now experiencing change, but it always has been, it's just faster and talked about more now. Just go and get started – don't look for an excuse not to do something but for a reason to try.
Sarah Marshall, technology correspondent, Journalism.co.uk
Do more than the lectures: My take is that formal training in law, shorthand, video and audio is valuable. But students who simply attend lectures will not be the ones who get the good jobs at the end; they will be the ones who fill their time blogging, making connections and going out with a camera or smartphone etc.Joseph Stashko, journalist, freelance
Be open to openness: I think that openness has, and will, continue to be a much bigger part of journalism than in the past. Obviously the Guardian is taking the open journalism approach to an organisation-wide level, but you also see it in things like journalists disclosing their interests or investments when writing.One place that does this really well is All Things D, the tech website owned by the Wall Street Journal. Each writer has an ethics statement under their byline, which outlines (in painstaking detail) interests that may be seen to prejudice a journalist's writing if left unsaid. You can see what I'm talking about here, and I think this kind of thing is only going to become more prevalent.
Martin Belam, lead user experience and information architect, the Guardian
Learn to code: I think it's good for journalists to get a basic understanding of the principles of how programming works; it can really help you use computers and technology tools to cut out some of the mundane bits of production.I think it's often hard for people to know whether they should be learning language X or language Y and whether they need to be able to build whole websites or applications. I think, as a bare minimum, any journalist entering the profession now should have a good understanding of marking up documents in HTML so they can add links, make lists and put things into bold and italics by hand.
(Matthew Caines,The guardian, )
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