(783) A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF ICT SKILLS OF 1ST YEAR JOURNALISM STUDENTS

摘要

The technological revolution over the last few decades has affected almost all aspects of humanactivities and people's everyday life. In this context, technology has become an integral part of everybusiness industry. The development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) alongwith the progress of internet has had significant impact on the journalistic field. However, journalismprofession has always been considered to be closely related to technology.Digital Journalism has been growing steadily during the last years introducing new trends andpractices in journalism education. This has led to an increasingly demand for trained journalistsconcerning new skills and standards. Nowadays, the journalist is expected to have the ability to exploita variety of tools and services in order to deal successfully with the changing work demands. Whiletraditional work skills remain essential elements of the journalistic education, the challenge is tocombine these with the needs of the new digital information age. Journalism education can play asignificant role in the changing environment of media industry.The present study focuses on the general and practical ICT knowledge of the 1st year undergraduatestudents in the School of Journalism & Mass Media Communication in Greece during the period 2003- 2014. More specifically, the purpose was mainly to assess, over time, the progress of theirknowledge and skills as well as to see their educational and training needs as future journalists. Insummary, the findings presented in this paper demonstrate a significant improvement in knowledge ofjournalism students regarding ICTs. Finally, through students' opinion the paper discusses thenecessity of ICTs in the journalism education as well as in journalism profession and work processes.