Being a journalist involves rigorous research, networking, creating, publishing and being an influencer. All of this sure sounds like various individual departments in an organization, but it is part of the job of a journalist. Being multidimensional in one’s approach and a people’s pleaser is the center of the commitment towards the job. Why is it so?
People want stories, not just a piece of information. As I write this blog, I am not putting bullet points with the information only because even I as a reader, while reading a blog want it to flow in a sequence or structure that makes my 4- 6 minute read entertaining while it is enlightening me with information. Hence, as a journalist one has to be an all- rounder. But what does it take to be an all-rounder?
Research on trends and topics
With a plethora of information available on the web, journalists spend a lot of time figuring out the trending topics/ people/ brands/ industries to come up with a list of topics to focus on. Research as a process is a two- way process. While conducting a research, a journalist has to think on his/ her foot and gauge if they have the network to validate the information.
Tip: Research on the web can be quite distracting given the pool of information that is available these days. Suggested articles on different social media platforms and a generic curiosity can swoon one away from the actual focus. Hence the tip here is to create a flow to your research and stick to that instead of getting lost in infinite browsing. To help yourself with the process, draw inspiration from your previous work and identify your workflows. Go through your previous notes, interviews and any other material you might have used to come up with your work in the past.
This might sound like a trivial part of the process but saves a lot of productive time & makes your effort efficient.
Interviews
Most of the work for journalists revolves around meeting and interacting with people. People who have expertise in the topics being covered, people involved with the story, seniors, managers and colleagues. Interviews can be of two types, formal as well as casual. Although the intention of a formal interview is clearly set and has a set of objectives, casual interviews can be equally productive and can reveal a lot of information that you were not even expecting in the first place!
Tip: Keep a track of all your interviews, whether formal or informal. There are multiple options available in the market these days that help you record your interviews but there are two challenges with that:
- 1. When you are prepared, in case of a formal scheduled interview, you can sure record it through complex tools, but are we able to achieve the same for casual conversations that can render highly important and groundbreaking information?
- 2. How do you utilize the recordings? A manual process of transcription later through recordings can sure save your time while interviews but it is not really saving you time because you do it later yourself.
Do not be hassled! I will talk about important solutions later in this article!
Creating an article
Now we come to the part that your end- user is actually interested in, your story! When you put your creative hat on and start creating what you want to present to the people, it is not just about writing that blog or the funky caption on Instagram that grabs people’s attention; the process is quite technical.
You want to create a story that people resonate with or feel a deep interest in but also a story that interests the google crawlers to improve your SEO and display your piece of work in online spaces. What I am hinting at is communication in your pieces of work. Refer to the language that people are using (there are some great free tools available for that in the internet), review the competition’s work (there is a lot to learn from the industry environment) and also your own previous work.
Tip: Keep your communication consistent with your company as well as with what people are looking for, for the best results. Use the right tools for executing this and always document your work when you are collaborating creative & technical aspects of work.
User engagement
This is one of the most important parts of the job not only for a journalist, but for anyone who is creating an interaction space online or offline. Apart from the analytics of your web pages, social media, etc. which is the key to succeed today, it is also crucially important to create a brand of yourself. At the end of the day, as a journalist people know your work because of you more than the brand name attached to it, hence even as an employee you become an asset to the organization if people believe in you as a professional.
Tip: Keep your content extremely engaging through relevant social media platforms. Make sure to have consistent interaction with your followers so even before Google ranks you, your followers know through your social channels about your upcoming work!
So as best practices, here’s what we can conclude:
- Be structured in your approach for your research- refer to use cases, pen down your flow and thoughts and have the structure ready even before you begin with the research, so you are not swayed away by the pool of information online.
- Multi- channel information gathering has to be recorded and documented. Save your time transcribing with AI induced technologies such as LAXIS that can help you accelerate your processes (more information below).
- Consistency in the language- Keep your communication consistent through your work, it adds to how people not only relate but also remember you. Use your transcriptions here to help reduce your manual work and get straight to the point.
- Keep updating your digital sources including social media/ blogs and interactive alive. If you understand the power of user- generated content, you know that you are the brand for your audience. User generated content can not only help you and your work reach further than your marketing efforts but it can also help improve SEO as well as SEM effectively.
- Last but not least, use the right tools. At this point of your read, you must have understood that the most important thing for you as a journalist is to ‘document’ your information. Manual processes have been our friend for a long time and will probably continue to be which is what we at Laxis understand. As a platform, we use the most updated AI & NLP technologies that will assist you by reducing your manual work but will also provide you the opportunity to manually approve of what we produce for you. So we are not taking your power away, but enhancing your power with time saving, technologically advanced solutions to make your efforts more fruitful than ever before.
Here’s how Laxis can help you be a step ahead in your Journalism career:
- While you are conducting interviews or having casual conversations with your managers, colleagues or even trying to discuss and gain some feedback, Laxis will get you rid of taking manual notes by recording all of your conversations in one place on any device and for any conversation online/ offline. But your smart phone recorders can do that as well, so why invest in Laxis?
- That is because Laxis will take it a step further for you and not only record your conversations but also provide real time transcripts. It goes further from here, head on to the next point!
- How do you trust our technology completely? I am not going to say that you should trust us because we are driven by technology. We provide you the features that will build your trust on the product based on the output. With these transcriptions, you can always edit/ highlight key points that you think are most important to your work. As I mentioned earlier, we are not taking your power away, but empowering you through advanced technologies.
- How do you keep everything structured and ready to be shared with your seniors for insights and feedback? With Laxis, you can select from our memo templates and just with a click, have your memo ready to be shared. This process is taking things further by not only recording, giving you real time transcriptions, enabling you to edit but also preparing all the information in your desired template ready to be shared internally or externally. So now, you won’t only save time transcribing, but you also won’t have to get into administrative tasks of reporting/ sharing information for documentation within the company/ writing minutes of the meetings to share with the interviewee.
So, what are you waiting for? Go sign up for our beta which is now ready to give you a glimpse of how you can succeed faster in achieving your deadlines and becoming the star!
To know more about the product and the team, visit us at https://laxis.tech/#/
Hope to see you back soon!
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