Te Waha Nui, the news publication created by journalism students from AUT University, has revamped its online presence in the past couple of weeks and is looking the better for it.
Alex Winkler, a postgrad journalism student who has been working on the website’s redesign, told me by email that one of the aims of the relaunch was to “develop it into a multi-user CMS to manage an average of 100 contributors”.
“The new site will feature much stronger imagery and hopefully a more intuitive navigation, to promote the news we are producing. It will feature stronger video, audio and social media content.”
Nice.
Alex said the redesign would be an ongoing process with more work to come on the technical side along with “working out an online style guide, the general publishing process and social media guidelines”.
The team are open for feedback – about the site and their stories – so have a look around and let them know what you think.
Wintec journalism students, meanwhile, are now publishing news stories on their relatively new website, waikatoindependent.co.nz, and it’s worth a look for Waikato-flavoured stories.
Aoraki Polytech journalism students, who are now based in Dunedin rather than Timaru, are publishing stories about their part of the world on their Newsline website.
And the old hands at Whitireia journalism school in Wellington are still pumping out stories, galleries and video on newswire.co.nz about Wellington city and surrounds.
It’s great to see more New Zealand journalism students getting published online. Here’s hoping they’re all getting to do the publishing side of it themselves (using WordPress, for example, cropping and posting images, writing web headlines, selecting categories and keywords, promoting stories on social media and so on) – because we’re starting to see more and more digital jobs advertised.
In the last two weeks I’ve seen job ads for a mobile editor (the first I’ve seen in New Zealand) with Yahoo! News, and a host of jobs for online editors at APN, Fairfax, MediaWorks and TVNZ among others. This week the Ashburton Guardian is advertising for a photographer/videographer and the Waikato Times recently took on a full-time videographer (the very capabale Mike Scott).
A current Media Works ad for an online editor says the successful candidate will need:
- Previous experience in an Online Editorial role would be useful but not essential, but you will need strong writing skills and be able to write quickly
- Some HTML skills, but we don’t expect you to be a Guru
- A solid understanding of Social Media platforms as well as understanding of the depth and importance of SEO to garner organic traffic to a website
- Experience here will set you apart from the rest
- Ability to demonstrate a good design eye and confidence with applications such as Adobe Photoshop
- Ability to do simple video/audio editing
While that’s not a straight journalism job, it’s not a bad list of skills to aim for if you’re an aspiring journalist. My advice? If you’re acquiring these skills at journalism school, great, if not - just go ahead and start learning them for yourself. There’s no shortage of tutorials online (YouTube, Google) and there’s free software for doing most of this stuff.
Reuben Schwarz, who works for Fairfax Media NZ, recently wrote a good post with suggestions for how to get your first job in online media. His list includes:
4. Promote, promote, promote – Start a blog talking about your chosen niche and interact with the community. Connect with people in the niche on Twitter and promote the hell out of yourself. Comment on other blogs in your chosen field.
5. Be realistic -You won’t be a columnist or feature writer for the New York Times. And you don’t really want to be anyway, it’s not as good as you think. Your best chance nowadays is in niche online publications. They’re the ones most likely to hire outsiders, because to them knowledge of the community and niche is more important than traditional journalism skills.
6. Get good at online marketing – Use your blog to learn about search engine and social media marketing. Knowing how to drive traffic to your work is extremely important online, and it’s a skill few other journalists have.
7. Get a smartphone (or tablet) – If you want to be a news reporter, within a few years most of your audience will be reading/watching/listening to your content on their iPhone or Android (or Windows phone…?). You need to understand how people consume content on these phones.
The rest of Reuben’s post is here. Worth a read.
You can see more journalism jobs in New Zealand here or subcribe by RSS to my weekly journalism jobs roundup here.
UPDATE:
I just noticed this post from Martin Belam ranting about how poorly digital skills are rated by many existing newsroom chiefs and journalists:
I was made [angry] yesterday by a piece in the Press Gazette, which suggested that editors do not value digital media skills.
“The top four most important skills cited by editors were: writing, finding news stories, interviewing and legal knowledge – while at the bottom of the list came social media, web skills and interaction with readers”When I read a sentence like that, I hear the sound of an industry committing suicide.
If you actually dig into the details of the survey, you’ll see it wasn’t that these skills aren’t valued at all, but that were valued less than “time management” amongst other things. Alison Gow blogged eloquently about the message that sends out to existing digital staff in the UK’s newsrooms.
All Evolving Newsroom
Te Waha Nui spruces up its website as more NZ journalism students get online
Te Waha Nui, the news publication created by journalism students from AUT University, has revamped its online presence in the past couple of weeks and is looking the better for it.
Alex Winkler, a postgrad journalism student who has been working on the website’s redesign, told me by email that one of the aims of the relaunch was to “develop it into a multi-user CMS to manage an average of 100 contributors”.
“The new site will feature much stronger imagery and hopefully a more intuitive navigation, to promote the news we are producing. It will feature stronger video, audio and social media content.”
Nice.
Alex said the redesign would be an ongoing process with more work to come on the technical side along with “working out an online style guide, the general publishing process and social media guidelines”.
The team are open for feedback – about the site and their stories – so have a look around and let them know what you think.
Wintec journalism students, meanwhile, are now publishing news stories on their relatively new website, waikatoindependent.co.nz, and it’s worth a look for Waikato-flavoured stories.
Aoraki Polytech journalism students, who are now based in Dunedin rather than Timaru, are publishing stories about their part of the world on their Newsline website.
And the old hands at Whitireia journalism school in Wellington are still pumping out stories, galleries and video on newswire.co.nz about Wellington city and surrounds.
It’s great to see more New Zealand journalism students getting published online. Here’s hoping they’re all getting to do the publishing side of it themselves (using WordPress, for example, cropping and posting images, writing web headlines, selecting categories and keywords, promoting stories on social media and so on) – because we’re starting to see more and more digital jobs advertised.
In the last two weeks I’ve seen job ads for a mobile editor (the first I’ve seen in New Zealand) with Yahoo! News, and a host of jobs for online editors at APN, Fairfax, MediaWorks and TVNZ among others. This week the Ashburton Guardian is advertising for a photographer/videographer and the Waikato Times recently took on a full-time videographer (the very capabale Mike Scott).
A current Media Works ad for an online editor says the successful candidate will need:
While that’s not a straight journalism job, it’s not a bad list of skills to aim for if you’re an aspiring journalist. My advice? If you’re acquiring these skills at journalism school, great, if not - just go ahead and start learning them for yourself. There’s no shortage of tutorials online (YouTube, Google) and there’s free software for doing most of this stuff.
Reuben Schwarz, who works for Fairfax Media NZ, recently wrote a good post with suggestions for how to get your first job in online media. His list includes:
4. Promote, promote, promote – Start a blog talking about your chosen niche and interact with the community. Connect with people in the niche on Twitter and promote the hell out of yourself. Comment on other blogs in your chosen field.
5. Be realistic -You won’t be a columnist or feature writer for the New York Times. And you don’t really want to be anyway, it’s not as good as you think. Your best chance nowadays is in niche online publications. They’re the ones most likely to hire outsiders, because to them knowledge of the community and niche is more important than traditional journalism skills.
6. Get good at online marketing – Use your blog to learn about search engine and social media marketing. Knowing how to drive traffic to your work is extremely important online, and it’s a skill few other journalists have.
7. Get a smartphone (or tablet) – If you want to be a news reporter, within a few years most of your audience will be reading/watching/listening to your content on their iPhone or Android (or Windows phone…?). You need to understand how people consume content on these phones.
The rest of Reuben’s post is here. Worth a read.
You can see more journalism jobs in New Zealand here or subcribe by RSS to my weekly journalism jobs roundup here.
UPDATE:
I just noticed this post from Martin Belam ranting about how poorly digital skills are rated by many existing newsroom chiefs and journalists: