Six competencies for news organizations

Northwestern's increasingly prolific Media Management Center has released a terrific report on the skillsets we will need in the newsroom if we're to prosper in the future. I recommend reading the executive summary at least and asking yourself: Do I have one or more of these competencies?

Quoting the news release on the six recommended competencies:

• The Platform Strategist: To capture market opportunities by leveraging content over and across multiple platforms, news organizations must understand the unique attributes and capabilities of each platform; know consumers and spot their unmet needs; understand their own strengths and offerings, and develop products accordingly.
• The Marketer: News organizations need to think like the best marketers - carefully defining their brands and working to develop deep consumer engagement with them. The essential first step: identifying more clearly what differentiates them in the marketplace and determining what unique value and role they provide.
• The Community Builder: News organizations need to become more expert community builders, using technology to help connect people around shared interests. Using the increased technological capacity for information-sharing between individuals and groups, news organizations can more effectively shape dialogue and enable consumers to link to discussions of increasingly wider context.
• The Data Miner: News organizations that become expert data miners and managers can develop unmatched depth of insight about consumers that they can use to profitably deliver both personalized content and targeted advertising. They can also unlock the value of their current and archival content.
• The Complete Storyteller: Digital technologies give news organizations a much broader palette and set of tools to use in their storytelling. It's not just text, photos and videos - it's a mix of all three plus interactivity, games, charts and much more. Excelling at these new kinds of storytelling is a competency that can differentiate news organizations from competitors.
• The Entrepreneur: In this environment, news organizations must develop their ability to think like entrepreneurs and identify assets they can leverage and new services they can provide, by pursuing partnerships, experimenting smartly and developing new models of advertising.