That’s the take away from a post on teaching multimedia storytelling techniques to reporters written by Anita Malik, deputy director of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University.

Among her other duties, Malik travels around the county presenting training workshops to newspaper journalists, including seminars on creating multimedia story packages. As a result, Malik says she encounters lots of writers who mistakenly hang onto the belief that multimedia isn’t journalism, that it’s some kind of add on that couldn’t stand on its own. Not true, Malik writes. “Whether it is video, a podcast or a blog posting, each element must be able to stand on its own and be balanced just as a print piece would be. The standards and ethics of good reporting still apply.”

When it comes to blogging, Malik believes that some day all reporters will blog in some fashion. She writes: “As witnessed recently in the coverage of the Wall Street turmoil, blogs are the predominant medium for breaking news. Blogs are, in fact, the prevailing format for online stories, and in some ways, stories and blog postings are almost interchangeable.”

Read her entire column at Multimedia Myths.

Malik writes regularly at BusinessJournalism.org, the online home of the National Center for Business Journalism. It’s worth checking out, even if you aren’t a full-time business writer. The site lists a variety of seminars, workshops and tutorials – paid and free – on business news reporting that the school offers around the country or online. It also lists a variety of resources useful to business reporters as well as jobs for business writers.