Last week, we had a guest lecture from Daniel Meadows, a self-confessed hippy-type of guy who also happens to be a lecturer here at the Journalism School.
It was the most interesting lecture I have ever been to. He talked about his first major project, Photobus, travelling around England photographing random people in order to build a real profile of his country.
He then talked about Digital Storytelling: ordinary people telling stories about their lives, outside of the ‘establishment media’.
You can see some of the videos on this page.
But the journalist in me is asking: “so what?”
Stories about random people’s lives are great in a Big Brother kind of way, but are they really relevant to lots of other people?
It goes against everything I have been taught so far – making content as relevant as possible to your target audience.
Perhaps even more important these days: how do you make money from it?
Conclusion: Digital Storytelling is great as a quirky, arty project, but it isn’t news journalism.
Our lecturer from the week before had more of an idea on how to make online journalism work for us.
Adam Tinworth of Reed Business Information is somewhat of an expert on online journalism.
His most important advice?
“Cover what you do best, link to the rest.”
Having a niche is obviously so important. So I’ve been taking it on board.
Here is my effort, a blog about the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group from northern Uganda.
Let’s see if it drives the kind of traffic that the blogs Adam Tinworth oversees do!
