I wasn’t going to burn the midnight oil and post tonight. For as anyone who has the misfortune to stumble across @MrRickWaghorn on Twitter knows, I’ve spent most of the weekend trying to rebuild the garden path that some tw*t managed to ruin by pulling up one wayward root…
In short, I’m knackered.
But then, courtesy of @DeeJackson, I got pointed in the direction of this…
http://markcoughlan.com/18-things-for-journalism-students-to-do-with-their-summer/
Which was all very laudable. This one clearly strikes a familiar chord… ‘Get some or your classmates who live locally and set in motion the process of developing a hyperlocal news website…
And again, all credit, to the author – no mention of working on the short-hand; practising that secret language of ours that – to this day – keeps most of us thinking that we’re something special.
We’re not.
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=245
What we are, however – or still should be – is bright, out-going, personable people who ought to be able to prise a few quid out of a hyper-local advertiser with as much as ease as we can dig out a decent, hyper-local story from the local parish councillor.
It’s the same skill set; it still comes down to trust, to personability, to warmth, to humour, to a little bit of arm-twisting – every trick that a local reporter learns on the door-step of a death-knock RTA should make he or she just as capable of going into the local hardware store on the High St and asking the owner if he’d like to advertise his new website on their hyper-local news website…
All you need is the right tools. And the same degree of confidence and tenacity that you bring to the story-finding side of our craft.
Because if the world is about to go one of two ways – to hyper-local or to hyper-national, if the great majority of J-School kids are going to cut their journalistic teeth on a hyper-local news website, why is no-one teaching them to sell ads?
Is everyone presuming that good ‘ol Uncle Google will take care of that bit?
We all teach the kids that Flickr is our new photography department; that WolframAlpha can be the new editorial library; that searching a Twitter cloud for a trend in conversation can be your new page-lead generator, but what does anyone ever teach them about earning money?
I look through that list of 18 things to do over the summer… and I can’t see too many about making money.
This is interesting.
How colleges in the US are desperately trying to re-write their curriculum to keep pace with the revolution engulfing us all… In particular, the line from Jeremy Gilbert, assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism…
‘New approaches to information gathering and analysis are needed for journalism to flourish. We must build new tools for the creation and consumption of news…’
Great. But IMHO, what is also needed for journalism to flourish is not so much ‘new approaches to information gathering and analysis’ – we can all knock on a RTA’s door – as new approaches to earning some cold, hard cash.
NorthWestern’s J-School features again here…
http://societrends.com/2009/05/11/nine-ways-newspapers-can-survive/
And as with Mr Coughlan’s advice to his kids, there’s much to commend.
But if students will, indeed, be ‘…be encouraged to connect with readers by writing out of storefront newsrooms in diverse Chicago neighborhoods…’ can they not also be encouraged to connect with that same local store owner and – given that they’re sat in his coffee shop drinking his latte once a week – prise a few bucks of advertising out of him..
That just as much as our futures might depend on establishing a new connection with our readers – by getting down from our age-old ivory towers, mingling in our storefronts, abandoning our secret languages and reaching for our mobiles – so equally we’re going to have to get out there and mingle with our advertisers…
… or else close our eyes and pray that Google have an answer.
Bollo*ks. Get out there and learn to sell. Make some money in your holidays; make that the 19th Commandment… ‘I will find one hyper-local advertiser from my friend’s hyper-local news site, this summer… I will…’
All anyone needs is the right tool.
Of course, I’m biased.
But I look at James on www.london-se1.co.uk and one week in to his beta trial of www.addiply.com and he’s found two hyper-local advertisers to take front page space off him for £25 per week.
A J-School kid walks in with a similar space to sell to Joe’s Pizza Parlour on the corner of 17th/8th St and Joe says to the kid: ‘So, what am I getting for this… the kids flips open his Mac, taps in the url…
http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_addiply&Itemid=69&pid=41
Name of site… Revenue model… Price… Views… and click…
That ain’t hard. Simple. Open. Transparent.
All it needs is someone to learn to ’sell’; and you may only have to do it the once. Joe ‘gets’ the fact he can place that ad himself just as he would put a postcard in the window of his local hardware store… and said J-School kids can get back to finding decent stories safe in the knowledge that someone is at least starting to reward him or her for their efforts.
And with that in mind, I think it’s high time someone, somewhere started to teach the kids how to sell.
And, ideally, to sell as if their very journalistic lives depended on it.
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Damn good post.
Quickly, just to clarify, I’m not trying to give “my kids” anything to do with my list of 18. I am one of “the kids”, I’m 21, still a student (though I freelance).
I completely agree with what you’re saying. I’ve been running a hyperlocal newspaper (our college newspaper runs solely on advertising and covers the area around the college, circ. 1000) for the last year and can honestly say the ability to sell ads was the most important skill I developed.
It’s a tough thing to do, the rejection is heartbreaking but you’ve got to push on – in that respect it’s much like freelancing. I’m not sure a dedicated module to selling advertising would be useful to j-students, where I studied there was a ‘Media Business’ class that encompassed it (selling ads made up about 1/3 of the module). I think that was about the right amount of dedication to give to the area.
I’m hoping to set up a hyperlocal website next year to cover the local area. With the newspaper we were trying to persuade businesses to pay €150 for a half-page, 1000 circ, tabloid. That was good experience because (in theory) it should easier to sell €50 adverts online for 1000 daily views with a better display option plus the option for the advertiser to log-in and edit their advert at any time.
Then again, I think the way online advertising works on media sites needs a revamp too, I hope to post on that in the next four or five days.
Mark
Spot on Rick. In this new economic world we find ourselves in, everyone has to be looking after themselves, whether selling their skills for a job interview, or developing a business, large or small.
I firmly believe that editorial and commercial need to collaborate more, at the very least.
Rick, I agree with you (up to a point: I don’t want to lose my journalists to ad sales exec jobs, having worked in advertising myself…)
I’ve just started teaching a new ‘Business of Magazines’ module at Sunderland which, for the first five weeks, focuses on starting from the ground up, as if our students were going to leave here this summer and set up their own magazine. In the first five weeks we had a talk on starting a magazine from Creativitiworks, the girls behind a new two-person get-out-and-sell magazine ItGuideNE.com, and fom the editors of North East Life. The message was sell sell sell: nothing survives if you don’t get out there and make the money.
This module is linked to the new Business of Magazines exam as part of NCTJ accreditation for their Magazine Certificate. So well done for the NCTJ, and the magazine industry, for seeing (some of) the need you post about, and working with educators to provide this course content.
What is worrying, and is a point I’ve raised, is that there is no pressure from the news industry for a similar module, and for what you’re talking about above, for students on a Business of (Local) News Module. There needs to be – but in all honesty, I’m not surprised there isn’t.
Thanks Rick. Good post.For us at UCF in Cornwall, UK we are hoping that this person will be leading Journalism into new territory:
http://www.falmouth.ac.uk/826/working-for-ucf-25/job-vacancies-78/course-leader-ba-hons-journalism-2719.html
All the best,
Paul Inman
Director
School of Media