September 18, 2014
Since the Internet is at its all-time high for usage and information retrieval, learning how to create your own site can be key, especially if you are an aspiring journalist. If you haven’t created your own website before it can be extremely tough, but in Entrepreneurial Journalism, Briggs lays out essential tips that can help.
Thinking and acting are two of the simplest, yet most effective things you can do when launching your own website. If you think of your plan and put it into action, the worst thing that can happen is that you have to try it again.
Briggs tells us that growing a blog into a business is a place where every aspiring site owner can start. Blogs are an easy way for you to become active on the internet. If you set your own goals, you will be able to envision how big or small you’d like your business to become and you can measure your success.
If you find your niche and run with it. While producing quality content, you can build a loyal audience and turn it into a community that can add value through engaging and sharing. Finding your focus can help you practice ethical and serious journalism with good values.
All of this takes patience, so testing, trying, playing, failing and trying again is the best thing you can do. Every day, new tactics and technology are being thrown out into the world so aim big, find your focus and know that failing first is okay.
Buzzfeed illustrates Briggs points. Jonah Peretti started Buzzfeed as an experimental lab that focused on tracking viral content. With its knack for sharing, Buzzfeed has hit over 150 million monthly visitors.
Once you can successfully become a digital journalist after thinking and acting on your dreams, picking up a few characteristics from a working Forbes journalist can help further your career.
Relating and engaging with the audience, knowing how to use the tools of social media, producing your own content such as photos, videos, podcasts, etc., and trusting in Google to give them the best chance at reaching the world all portray a certain style of a person; a resourceful one.
While being a resourceful journalist is key in surviving within this modern, digital age, keeping your values and ethics in check can be a challenge. The tension between traditional journalism and online journalism is a big challenge we face today. The culture of traditional journalism, with its values of accuracy, pre-publication verification, balance, impartiality, and gate-keeping, rubs up against the culture of online journalism which emphasizes immediacy, transparency, partiality, non-professional journalists and post-publication correction.
Sometimes, when people look at online sites, the stumble across ones such as The Onion, as well as other satire websites. This is an example of the difference between online journalism and traditional journalism where the internet has more freedom to publish and post, especially with tactics like blogs, and some things are perceived as the truth when in reality, it can be a hoax.
With traditional journalism, we question where it is going in today’s world. Will it survive? Obviously the verification and accuracy on traditional journalism is admired but it is slowly dying out to instant news.