On the 23rd of September, a myriad of media spokespeople came together to hold a conference called ‘Hello Culture’.
Hello Culture was all about the future of the media and how social media is beginning to be a lost concept, it is all just media now. It discussed how the new forms of media that are being created are actually creating more opportunities for content creators to express themselves.
Changes in the production of media are making it very easy to put your content out there and to get it noticed. People can now produce media from anywhere, with new apps and platforms becoming stages for people to perform on. The rise of Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok have swept the media industry off of it’s feet and created jobs no one ever thought would exist.
People now also consume media differently, instead of reading the news in a paper or magazine, they read the latest on the apps on their phones, wherever they are. Comapnies now produce a subscription service on Snapchat stories, post IGTV clips daily and even recruit employees solely to run their ‘social’ media. This affects my own practice of being a Journalist and news-gathering because not only does it change the way I can produce content, it changes the way I can gather news and also the way I can engage with my audience.
Previously I have avoided certain platforms either because I didn’t understand them or I just simply like to stick to what I know. This conference has shown me that I need to experiment with new platforms and give myself new opportunities, this has also made me aware that I can be discovered for my talent in an unconventional way.
My audience as a journalist can vary, depending on what I produce, it can also depend on the platform I choose to share my work on. However, some work is just not suitable for some platforms, for instance, if I was to publish an article about climate change on my website, I couldn’t then publish the same thing on twitter, Facebook or Snapchat.
This doesn’t mean to say that all of these platforms don’t link in with each other though, as I would be able to post a teaser about my work with the link on Facebook and twitter, and post a picture or video talking about some of the things I talk about in my article on Snapchat and leave a swipe up link, if people find what I post interesting and want to read the whole thing, they can.
Hello Culture brought to light the fast paced industry of media and how, as a journalist I need to be able to adapt and know where my audience want to consume my news. We need to take advantage of all of the opportunities that are available to us, in order to be a sucessful story teller.
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