By Lindsay Meeks

With new tools and technology, journalists are changing their job titles and shifting from monomedia producers to multimedia jack-of-all trades. The question many newsrooms are facing is how to best accomplish these goals. Should one person do everything? Should there be some sort of assembly line of production? How can newspapers best reach out to different communities with the journalists they have?

Restructuring of the newsroom and the journalist produces a new form of news while still maintaining the basic elements of journalism.

Kevin Sites of hotzone.yahoo.com traveled the world going to 19 different countries over the course of a year targeting different conflict zones. Sponsored by Yahoo!, Sites shot video, took photos,
and wrote stories that were sent via satellite back to the U.S. A team here prepared his work for the Web and posted the content daily on hotzone.yahoo.com.

Sites is one of many journalists often referred to as "Backpack journalists" who are emerging in newsrooms across the world. They are one-person multimedia teams. The standard backpack they carry consists of a digital camera, laptop, satellite, and video camera. They record, edit, write, and report everything on their own.

Sites' goal was to show the United States parts of the world that are often overlooked. In his speech he talked about how he initially expected to find war and despair but found determination from the people to keep going on with their lives. He received success among bloggers and other Internet users.

"We had a core of about two million people per week," Sites said.

Doing a project like this again might prove difficult, though, according to Sites. The whole project was fairly expensive with a basic start-up fee of about $50,000 for the equipment. With satellite fees of about $50,000 and then the cost of traveling, the whole project price continues to rise, according to Sites.

Another approach that steers away from the $50,000 bracket used by Sites and Hot Zone is the Fort Myers News Press's

"Mojo" journalists. They are completely mobile and have no official desk at the newspaper. The journalists serve as mediators between the newsroom and the community. Each mojo journalist is assigned an area and equipped with a laptop and digital camera and do everything from reporting to passing out fliers to showing viewers how to best utilize the website.

They do not have a heavy emphasis on video or audio, but serve more as a liason for the newspaper to the community.

But elsewhere in other news rooms, video and audio is the hot topic. Where trained videographers and audio production employees are lacking, journalists are being trained to record audio for audio slide shows and sound clips. Photographers are picking up video cameras. Journalists like Christina Pino-Marina of the Washingtonpost.com are stepping up to switch from writing to video to help fill the need for videographers.

She made the move after she began experimenting with video in her spare time. The Washington Post needed videographers, so she made the move final and now has more equipment to haul around than just her simple note pad.

Flexibility and the need for innovation push journalism and encourages growth. The theories on how to make these innovations are out there. Either change and innovate, or tune in next year to see how your competition passed you.

Hear more from Kevin Sites of Hot Zone.

Why is the project so necessary?

Were you ever afraid of the dangers of going into these areas?

What advice would you give to a young journalist?

How did you learn to do multimedia journalism?

How do you juggle all the media, and do you ever feel like you're being stretced too thin?