The trinity of skills?

Ryan Sholin compares notes with a photojournalist/multimedia specialist and comes up with this gem of an excerpt:

The task for j-schools, of course, is to teach every journalism student at least ONE of the following skills:

• Multimedia: Video and audio recording and editing, plus any Flash skills at all. This gets you hired.
• Interactivity: Know everything about blogs, and think about how to manage and moderate commenting systems, forums, and community sites. This gets you hired.
• Data: Be a wizard with Excel at the least, maps mashups if possible, and Django if you want to go further down the rabbit hole. This gets you hired.

If you’re in school and you’re not taking a class we’re you’re learning at least one of these things, start teaching yourself now. Get a blog and start reading blogs about new media and the Web. Experiment.  Learn.

Knowing how to do nothing but report and write gets you hired … as a freelancer.

I’ll quibble slightly. Journalism schools need to teach every student SOMETHING about all of those skills, and how they fit together - journalism 2.0, if you will. From there, students should be able to veer off into their own passions. And then those passions need to be brought back together sometime around senior year to put together packages that take all of those skills and mash them up in a team-based environment.
As for data, Excel is probably a nice starting point, but you really should try to get farther down into the database level (MySQL or any of the coming crop of easier-to-use web apps).

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