It’s clear that in this day and age journalism students and journalists need to know more than just words.

But what exactly do they need to know? Mindy McAdams has an excellent blog post about the skills that journalism students should have.

As much as I harp on the need to have a varied skill set, hearing it from her is much more powerful. She both has good professional experience and she is also one of the top academics in online journalism.

Every journalism student and journalist should know how to write, edit and check for AP style. Journalists should also have a firm grasp of ethics and law pretaining to journalism. Those are givens.

But journalists need more than that. So, what exactly do they need to know?

1. (X)HTML
Every j-school student should know what (X)HTML is, be able to read and write it and understand what it can and cannot do.

(X)HTML is not used that much anymore to actually layout Web sites. CSS is used for that. (X)HTML, however, is still the foundation that Web sites are built on. It provides the guidance for where a paragraph starts and ends using the <p></p> tags, for instance.

But most (X)HTML documents today are very light on actual (X)HTML and very heavy on CSS hooks. CSS provides the ability to style a whole site via a few universal hooks on any number of pages. That’s what makes it so powerful.

Students should know and understand (X)HTML, and frankly it can be learned in a few days at most. Just head over to the W3C school and read their tutorial.

Many journalists will need to occasionally deploy html tags like <strong></strong> (to bold words, for instance) to lightly style documents.

2. Learn a CMS
McAdams rightly points out that most sites are controlled by a content management sytem. Many papers won’t even allow you to go outside of the CMS to create content (although my paper does and I frequently go outside of the CMS).

But you cannot walk into a journalism job these days and not know how to use a CMS. Every journalist should understand what a CMS is and how to use one. As more and more staffs converge, it will be more important than ever for every journalist to understand content management systems.

Many of your school’s Web sites will be controlled by a CMS. It would be wise to join your student newspaper and try to learn and use the CMS as much as possible. If you’re a professional journalist and you don’t use your paper’s CMS, try asking someone who does to show you around it.

Try out all of the different posting options and see what it can and cannot due. That’s a good start, but getting a blog from WordPress.org is an even better idea. They provide free hosting, and you can set up a blog in minutes.

You can either select an area to post about like I do, or just randomly post, but what you post isn’t that important. What you are using this blog for is to learn how to use a CMS inside and out. WordPress is esentially a free and fairly powerful and flexible CMS.

WordPress can grow with you. You can add new features to your blog or completely change the design, which will be fun to do if you know CSS. It’s also a great showcase for potential employers, and you might grow a strong following with your blog.

3. Know audio and video
Whether or not you plan on doing a lot of audio or video work isn’t the key. You’ll probably be asked to do some of it in the future. What you want to learn are the basics: how to capture good audio or video (the conditions make a big difference), what is and isn’t professional quality gear, how do you use the gear and how to make good journalism with audio and video.

The most important thing for a j-school student is to have a strong appreciation of online journalism and new media. Whether or not you are ever a coder or videographer is not the point.

Understanding varying technologies is the key to colloraboration. One day you might be a product leader or editor, and you’ll be much better at your job if you know what can and cannot be done, even if you can’t do it yourself.

4. Consider some coding for more in-depth projects
This recommendation is a little more tricky. It depends on what kind of journalism you ultimately want to do. If you want to go beyond just using a CMS, than you need to know CSS. It’s not that hard to learn, and an excellent book by Eric Meyer provides a fun and easy way to learn CSS.

With CSS you can create custom sites or highly-stylized sections within your CMS. But CSS is just a mark-up language for design. If you want to go deeper, you’ll need to consider PHP, MySQL, Javascript/Ajax and possibly other languages and platforms.

If you want to create a database-driven project like ChicagoCrime.org, you’ll need to know how to code (it is made with the Web framework Django which uses the programming language Python). Database journalism is on the rise, and it can really be a powerful tool. It’s not for everyone though.

If you want to concentrate on creating content, I’d worry more about my previous three recommendations than this one. But at least try to understand what is and what isn’t possible using programming. A site like PoltiFact is made possible because it is driven by a database.

It was created with Django, by the way.

Conclusion:
A journalists needs more in his or her toolbox today than ever before. I wouldn’t try to be an expert at all new media skills. It’s more important to have an appreciation and understanding of the concepts I have mentioned above.

Maybe you’ll never learn video, but if you don’t really understand it or how it can be done well, how will you ever collaborate well on a project that brings together several different kinds of journalism? What if your video person doesn’t understand databases? Well, you’ll probably have a project that just doesn’t work well with the pieces you try to cobble together.

If you are already out of j-school, McAdams has some advice for you:

There’s a heck of a lot more to being an online journalist than HTML. I’d venture a guess that many online journalists today don’t even know HTML. Designing the page layout or the package is the job of a designer, not the reporter. But using a CMS? Writing a good headline on your blog post? Writing good link text and choosing appropriate material to link to? That’s what online journalists are doing — as well as uploading photos and audio files, creating spreadsheets, and making mashups.

If you know how to use a CMS, you can make your stories shine. You can link to relevant content and really give stories and features depth. That’s one of the most powerful aspects of the Web, because it allows journalists to put stories in context.

Journalism is changing. Your skills will need to as well.

Additional reading: My summer reading list will provide you with the roadmap to become a new media journalist.