Excerpt from my Mashable post today:

As the news industry looks to reconstruct its suffering business model, the journalists of today must reconstruct their skill sets for the growing world of online media. Because of cutbacks at many news organizations, the jobs available are highly competitive. News companies are seeking journalists who are jacks of all trades, yet still masters of one (or more).

2010 will likely be a time of transition as today’s journalists catch up to learn the multimedia, programming, social media, and business skills they’ll need to tell their stories online. These new skills are especially relevant to startups that are looking to hire multi-skilled and social media-savvy journalists. Below we’ve gathered some skills that are quickly becoming basic requirements for the journalist of tomorrow. These skills are presented in no particular order.

Though it publicly debuted in September and boasts 1 million users, I recently stumbled across Dropbox through a friend on Facebook. Dropbox, whose slogan is “secure backup, sync and sharing made easy,” is doing just that. Making your life easier in backing up files and being able to access them from anywhere through the Web.

It is like a 2G flash drive (2G is the free amount of space that it comes with, additional space can be bought or obtained through referrals of friends) that you don’t have to carry around or worry about losing or connecting to your computer. It also works with Windows, Macs and Linux. The Web account also shows you all your recent activity, allows you to access all your content and download it. But what I want to talk about is how journalists and newsrooms can use this as a tool.