Some 200 delegates are in Glasgow today for the Society of Editors’ annual conference, this year titled “The Next Generation”.

Speakers will look at traditional media working with digital media, training and multi-skilling.

Journalist, publisher and pundit Andrew Neil last night delivered the SoE Lecture, and the whole of today is taken up with a series of talks and discussions.

Andrew Neil told delegates: “There’s never been a better time to be a journalist. There’s never been a better time to get your journalism out to more people.”

Among today’s speakers is HoldtheFrontPage publisher Patrick Astill, who is due to give delegates the first sight of our journalism survey, which 568 people responded to in a fortnight.

He will speak during ‘The New Journalist’ session, chaired by Peter Cole.

He will tell editors and executives how the survey took the opinions of 181 reporters, 75 students, trainees and juniors, 68 sub-editors, 53 editors and 69 other management/newsdesk people.

Daily regional newspaper staff accounted for 197 respondents, while a further 191 work in local weekly newspapers. There were 72 responses from freelances, 45 people work for magazines, with 27 from the nationals – exactly the kind of breakdown we would expect from HTFP readers.

A quarter of respondents saw their next job as being in regional daily newspaper, with the next biggest group, 14 per cent, hoping their next job would be in PR/communications.

More than half the respondents have a degree, 22 per cent holding a media degree. Yet 17 per cent didn’t feel their degree was important to their work.

Among the skills journalists do rate, were shorthand, with 55 per cent saying it is “very important”, legal knowledge (58 per cent), local knowledge (53 per cent), and a good contacts book (50 per cent).

Yet just one per cent felt video skills “very important” in journalism, despite the media’s recent moves into this format. Overall, 358 people – or 63 per cent – said it was “not important” or “not at all important”.

Patrick told delegates: “This is a surprising result but the places where video is taking off in the regional press is such a small sample it may simply fail to register in a survey of this kind.

“Factored out, it may be that just one per cent of regional newspaper people are actually involved in video – but this looks set to change as all local newspaper companies are investing time and money in training and development.

“For the people who aren’t involved, video simply doesn’t touch their lives… yet.”

Only 22 people – 3.9 per cent – felt online journalism or HTML skills were “very important” in journalism, while just 98 people thought that multi-skilling photojournalism skills – that’s 17.3 per cent – were “important” or “very important”.

Other interesting statistics to come out of our survey, which ran for two weeks last month, were that: