COM412: Final Feature

Final Feature: The Future of Journalism

By interviewing an editor, a media educator and a student journalist, we hope to gain some insights on the future of journalism in Singapore. The group includes Kang Li, Alex, Sheere and Justin.

This package will include:

• + 3 profile stories + portraits
• the following alternative story-formats
  • Get journalism students together to visualise the future newspaper
  • Mock resume of a model future journalist
• Video
  • Four journalism students (us) share what the future of journalism holds for us

FYP advice

Choose the right people as your FYP mates, people who are willing to work as a group.

Don”t panic when things go wrong. Breathe.

Don’t be too dependent on your Supervisor. Think on your own feet.

Get people, preferably non-CS students, to read your articles. See if they understand what you’re talking about.

EDIT EDIT EDIT.

Don’t patronise your group mates. If there’s something wrong with their articles, TELL them.

Don’t raise your voice at your group mates.

Be patient.

ASK for help/advice  if you are stuck. Be open to ideas.

You are going to learn a lot more doing your FYP than any other modules you have taken. Enjoy.

Journalists share their secret lives

Washington.com interviews journalists about their secret lives, such as where they bring their sources to talk, what are their morning reads and their guilty pleasures. To me, journalists are different from the people walking in the streets. They have lives that are as extraordinary as, maybe Barack Obama.

The article is a revelation of their personal lives. One journalist, also a shoes addict, wears flashy stilettoes to get herself noticed…

Getting to know the visitors from Penjuru

Pictures of my neighbourhood here

Photojournalists experiment with narration

Photoessay is old. Instead of text, photojournalists are telling stories through Voice Over on their photo slideshows. These photo narrations are appealing, fast and easy to digest for the laymen. Many people will most probably prefer this to the in-depth but lengthy stories.

Looks like photojournalists are crossing the line over to the duties of the writers. While some experimented it long ago, others struggled with the new trend. Brent Foster of the Los Angeles Times shared very briefly why he had resisted the change and what he had learned from his first try.

Also, check out the photo narration by Tyler Hicks.

How to break in to social media

Monica Guzman, Seattle Post online reporter, asked people on twitter to give her journalism class tips to break in to the social media. One says journalists should join a lot of sites, like Facebook and Twitter, and be everywhere the audiences are. Another adviced journalists to come out of their byline and be out in the open for interaction.

They struck me as the biggest difference between traditional and online journalism. While all focus is on content in print journalism, the expectation of online journalism goes beyond the stories to the personal information of journalists and their interaction with their audiences. My question is, wouldn’t news be judge based intimate details on top of journalistic skills? Seems like journalists today have to play their own PR for their stories and expose their personal life like a celebrity.

When I chose to major in Journalism, I didn’t think selling myself would be part of the job.

What a journalism student does at 3am

Editors’ advice for journalism students TODAY

I got a serious wake up call from a survey on editors’ and publishers’ expectations and advices for journalism students.  More than half of them are looking at qualities like diversity in skills such as multimedia story-telling and web reporting when they hire. Only 16 out of 86 ticked “curiosity and enthusiasm”. What happened to those virtues that lecturers told us are important? Now I know why students are often criticised for being idealistic.

What’s most shocking (or am I lagging) was that 71 percent would advice recent graduates to become a freelancer to get experience or to make a career out of it. But can everyone afford that? What happens to those promising but poor journalism students? I suppose say goodbye to journalism altogether or become a part-time freelancer.

Newsroom uses live chat to open morning meetings to viewers

I always find newsroom meetings the least ideal place to brainstorm for ideas. When the same people attend every meeting, sparks generated from enthusiastic discussions usually do not last through the year. This week, US TV station WGAL launched live chats with the public during their morning meetings to seek story ideas.  Such heavy participation in news content is a big step away from audiences reacting to published stories through emails, or at most forum.

When I was doing my internship in Nepal, never there was a day I had to crack my brain for a story idea. Being a foreigner I have strangers opening up to me and tell me their stories. At the end of my attachment I still had 4 story ideas in my notebook I have no time to work on. What WGAL did was bringing strangers, a whole lot more, into the newsroom, without having reporters to establish a relationship, or look foreign and approachable.