For our online journalism class we had to recreate a news website in wiki form. Myself and Alan Regan recreated the Daily Telegraph's website.

Visit our Telegraph homepage

An example of an article page

There's one large repercussion of online journalism on journalists themselves that hasn't really been disucessed in any great detail. Online news is becoming more and more about the individual reporter. They must maintain blogs and twitter updates and keep the website up to date with the latest news (which now has the most miniscule of turn around times). The stress on a person of maintaing all this is incredible.

But the main point I was to make is that, in a tradtional newsroom, it was very easy for a journalist to take holiday time and he/she would be covered by another staffer. This si not the case anymore, the highly demanding twitter followers and readers of their blogs will not wait for a journalist to rest for a week or two like they themselves would expect to be able to do. This new breed of news consumers are demanding and if a journalist neglects them, even for their own well-being, they will migrate.

I think too much is being expected of journalists today. Convergence is all well and good, but the benefit of convergence is that a journalist can report in the most appropriate medium, not report in all media, all the time. There will come a stage where media employers are just expecting far too much of their employees. A worker of any kind can only take so much, that time has not yet come, but it will!

It's always interesting to get the opinion of the older journalists on future of the profession. Some try to dodge the question with the skills they have learnt from years of experience in the media industry, others, however, embrace it and candidly talk about it. Bryan Dobson most definitely falls into the latter.

He spoke to a small group of student journalists about his time in the industry and where he sees the profession going in the next few years. "The job we do as journalists still needs that professional approach. I see the new technology as people doing the same thing they’ve done for years... trying to make sense of the world for people," he said.

Of course, the main difference is the fact that mobile journalists (mojos) are paid by the paper they write for. After that is taken out of the equation there are few differences. A mojo will probably be better equipped, but their output looks very similar to that of a citizen journalist.

Mojos report on everything and anything and record the event for all forms of broadcast and print. One of the main jobs of a mojo on a local paper is to train local people to be citizen journalists who will get paid to contribute to the newspaper.

I think the idea of being a mojo is a good one if it means that you are prepared to record an event in several different ways. However, if it means that you run around like a headless chicken trying desperately to cover everything, but nothing in detail, then it's a very bad idea.