Blog Eight

I am very sure that my area of interest will be welcomed into the market. The Journalism degree at the University of Canberra is always growing, and this website can be used as a tool to promote the Uni, the journalism course and the writing of the students here.

Articles by other people, including faculty and the community, will be part of the site also, and these will help to draw in a greater audience.

Being able to sustain the site is another matter. I am sure that where there are journalism students, there are always stories, reports and reviews. However, it will be the act of keeping up the publication at regular intervals that might fall by the way-side, which, from my own experience at up-keeping blogs, generally goes to shit during busy times of the times.

If there is a team of students who are able to delegate tasks among them, and keep up with the influx (hopefully) of articles, then the site should be viable.

The market in this area of interest is definitely not saturated. Sure, there are other magazines trying to share the same target audience, but this site will reach out to a wider market over time. Also, the quality of journalism will be better as the contributions will be from journalism students, and having a by-line is an important part of our career portfolio. This site will also have sections, as mentioned in earlier posts, for things like music and food reviews, book and movie reviews and other things.

Another thing we can introduce is a multimedia section for, for example, graphic designers, photographers, architects… other people from UC who want to contribute their work. These people could post photos, or organise a journalism student to write an article to go with what they have to offer.

The site might even have a forum where people, like a photographer, who has a great photo but wants a story written can connect with a journalism student. Or it could work the opposite way, if a journalist is going to an event and needs a photographer… Oh so many options, so little words!

(If the online publication turns into a print publication, and then that fails, here is an idea for the leftovers)

 

ACIJ Conference: Back to the Source

A group of 14 Journalism students from the University of Canberra travelled four long hours on a bus to Sydney to attend the Australian Centre for Investigative Journalism Conference, held at ABC and UTS over two days.

One by one we wearily arrived at the bus terminal at 6am on Friday morning. Being journalists, the first comment from most was, “Did you hear about the chemical fire?!” The fire began in a factory and was causing a 10km exclusion zone in the northern suburbs, a breaking news story for Canberra.

As we boarded the bus we fell quietly into seats beside our UC companions, ready to begin the arduous journey.

The bus chokes and lurches up Northbourne Avenue, and when we finally hit the highway we all pull out our phones to tweet a picture of the chemical fire spewing black smoke into the otherwise clean Canberra air.

Blog Seven

The ‘Back to the Source’ Investigative Journalism Conference was held in Sydney on the 16th and 17th of September 2011. This conference was designed to bring together professionals, academics and student journalists to, “explore the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for investigative journalism.” This was a popular topic among journalists and a niche group of the public because the outcomes would affect people who follow this line of work. The conference brought together a range of different people who shared their stories in a panel discussion. These discussions were tweeted, blogged and talked about during the conference and after. This is what the conference is about…

Blog Six

This blog is designed to help those who run college newspapers.

It says it was designed to “inspire” those involved with the publications. The blog refers to a recent survey by Alloy Media + Marketing which came up with these figures. “More than three-quarters, or 76 percent, of college students surveyed had read their college newspaper in the past month.” As mine will be an online publication, there will not be any expense in setting it up or keeping it going. With a readership of three-quarters of the student population, that would be plenty to attract attention for those wishing to publish their work.

This website is promoting advertising in College newspapers.

It says, “Statistics show that in some colleges as much as 98% of the campus population reads the paper.” The website also claims this, “With advertising in college newspapers reaching 11.5 million college students.” Although this is an American website, it gives us an idea of the figures of who reads student newspapers. In comparison to the previous stats from Alloy Media + Marketing, these surveys suggest that a large percentage of the student population does read  their own newspapers. In transferring this to online, I think it will make it easier for students to get in touch with the publication and to submit their work.

As long as there is enough publicity, mostly through word-of-mouth, at the University and hopefully beyond its boundaries, then the online news site should be a hit.

Blog 4

Who should I follow online (twitter and RSS), and why? [can include classmates]

Twitter is an important aspect of modern journalism, and therefore can be used as a tool, not only to connect with other people but to also keep up with news and current affairs.

People who might be useful to follow on twitter in my area of interest include:

- staff from journalism faculties  at universities throughout Australia.

- students studying journalism at university

- journalism careers online

Blog Post 2

My area of interest is giving Journalism students information about courses, jobs and the industry.

Information is readily available for journalists and people wanting to study journalism. The J-School  website has information about studying Journalism, it also has a list of institutions in Australia that offer the course.

Another website offers…

http://www.australiangraduate.com/journalisma.htm

Australian universities, those that offer Journalism, have websites which offer descriptions of their courses for prospective students. Often, on their own Moodle sites, the universities will have a jobs board or forums for students.

The LinkdIn website offers people from all careers a chance to connect with each other by posting a short profile about themselves

Some old fashioned procrastination.

This morning, I walked into the newsagency to buy my paper, and the boy (he was about 16) behind the counter had headphones in. He said hi, took my money, and I left. But is this really what customer service has come to?

Back when I was a kid, my parents owned a small hardware store.  

I worked in the shop from the age of 11, helping out mostly with re-stocking and customer service. I got paid $5 an hour, if I was lucky. If there were no customers and no stock to re-fill, then there was always cleaning. I would spend hours picking all the stock off shelves and wiping down the dust that had gathered. I hated cleaning, but I knew I was being paid to work, so I was never allowed to just stand around.

However, the customers always came first. No matter what I was doing, if there was a customer, they took priority. Customer service was always a big deal to my parents. The Mitre 10 down the road sold their products cheaper, but what we had over them was our service. Our regular customers would come in for a chat, and to get advice on how to fix this, or how to paint that.

My dad, the ultimate handy man, had experience in a lot of areas. He is a boilermaker by trade, and worked in my Grandfathers hardware for a long time. He could answer every question thrown at him, and if we didn’t have the stock, he would tell the customer where they could find it.

Things have changed enormously since then.

I work in a clothing store, and I get annoyed when the customers have headphones in! It makes it impossible to start up a conversation, which is probably their point.

I can’t help but notice that customer service is a dying tradition, which is exemplified by the introduction of self-serve checkouts and online shopping. Something that was once a powerful business tool, and perhaps still is in small towns, is being thrown away like it was never worth anything.

I admit, I take my computer to work and when there are no customers I do things like write this blog, however I am constantly checking to see if anyone has entered, and if someone even looks like they are walking towards the store, I put down the computer and smile.

The worst thing, for me that is, about the lack of customer service these days, is that when I am genuinely nice to people who enter the store where I work, I get incredulous glances, like they’ve never experienced it before. Or I get completely ignored.

Just like everything, customer service will make a comeback, eventually. I just hope, for all our sakes, it won’t be as disastrous as leopard print and crop tops.

 

Australian Journalism Students: Networking

I am interested in creating a networking medium for Journalism students – let’s call them pre-graduates (coined by me, meaning undergraduate undertaking their final year of study) – to be used as a tool in order to get jobs in the industry when they graduate.
It would be interesting to see how exclusive I could make the site, for example, for Australian university graduates in Journalism /Communications only.
The site would be free to join, and the pre-grads would have to create a portfolio marketing themselves for work in the media industry.
This is particularly interesting to me as I am part of the executive committee for the UC Press Club, where we involve students in networking events to help them create contacts in Canberra. And as clichéd as it sounds, it’s not who you know…
Obviously this is a niche market, specifically designed for pre-graduates, so they will be my target audience. Eventually, I would like to propose this model to a company who already has the infrastructure to support something like this, but research into that will come…

Blog Five

The most common form of content in my area are news articles. Within this parent category, soft news will be the most common articles published. Other types of articles will include hard news, features and investigative stories.

Soft news will be the most common as the students will have a few days to write their stories, if that’s how long they need. Hard news needs to be written in the first couple of hours of that story being broken, and in the future the standard of the website will increase and the goal will be to break news on the website or in the paper. The benefits of having soft news is that it doesn’t date as quickly as hard news, so the articles can be promoted for up to a few weeks after their publication.

The articles will focus on the Canberra region, as this is what our readers will be most interested in. Entertainment, political events and other stories are the most likely form of content as many of the people who I have contacted to write for the blog are interested in these things. I think the reason for this is that we live in Canberra which is the centre of politics in Australia. There are also heaps of venues that hold concerts for up-and-coming artists, which is popular in Canberra, in my belief, because of the many universities which it plays host to.

Image from acrossoceania.comLive Music Gig Guide for Canberra