Portfolio: Rethinking the sorting of my content

As mentioned in a previous blog post, I had sorted my work by publication, as can be seen in the image below, with each logo on the homepage linking to a catalogue of articles from that particular publication.

However, over the course of the module, I’ve been reconsidering how I’m going to sort my work. Luckily, because I started work on my Moonfruit portfolio almost immediately when we started the module, I’ve had time to assess the advantages and disadvantages of various designs.

On my portfolio, I want to showcase only my best work, and I found that over the past few years my writing skills have developed and improved a lot. This means that the work I did earlier on in the course or on earlier work placements isn’t as good as more recent work.

Personally, I would rather not have the weaker material on the portfolio, and therefore, if I do it by publication, I would have a section that showcased weaker writing from an earlier placement than the section with, say, my work at Digital Spy which is more recent.

Therefore, I think that dividing my work by genre (Eg. Entertainment, technology, etc…) would be more beneficial. This means I can pick and choose my best work but still have sufficient content in each area.

Below is a screenshot of the revisions I’ve made to the home page:

As you can see, I obviously had to change the images. I had previously got permission from the respective companies to use their logos in the previous design. However, I can still use them around the website even if they’re not on the home page which is useful.

All the images I’ve used in the new design are also creative commons. However, the picture I’ve used in the ‘broadcast’ square is only a temporary picture as I intend to take a picture in the Leeds Met news studio next time I am in there and use it on the website.

The only thing that would tempt me to stick with the original logo approach is the look of it – It looks cleaner and crisper. However, functionality and ease of navigation are more important in my opinion, and the new design doesn’t exactly look bad!

Week 8: Pitching a story

This week we learned the ins and outs of pitching story ideas to editors.

Firstly, we looked at what sort of publications will accept pitches from start-up journalists. It’s advised not to pitch to large publications such as Empire or Marie Claire as they’re less likely to commission the story.

In terms of actual material to write, you have to determine which parts of the publication to write for – is it a feature? A news story? Front of book? Sidebar?

Always try and look for a peg for your story. For example, use Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow splitting to do a ‘top 10 celebrity marriages we didn’t see coming’.

List articles always do well. They’re easy to construct, easy to read and easy to research.

When actually pitching, you have to address the appropriate editor (Sub-editor, section editor etc…) on a personal level. Avoid using greetings such as ‘Dear Sir / Madam’ and opt for something more personal, such as ‘Dear David’.

The pitch should never be too long, maybe 150-200 words. It needs to be straight to the point, laying out your idea in a clear way.

A very short paragraph saying who you are followed by detailed summary of your idea and then a description of the structure of the piece is the best format to use. #

You can always include more than one pitch in an email, but it’s recommended that you submit no more than two or three at a time, and never submit the same pitch to two publications at the same time!

Below is an example pitch I put together:

Week 7: Covering Budget Day

This week was Budget day, when chancellor George Osborne announces how the government will be spending the country’s money.

To take advantage of this opportunity, we simulated a news room experience and all contributed to a rolling news feature,  with each of us taking on a different role.

I was responsible, along with Alex Price, Fern Crawley and Chris Hitchings, for the data and infographics side of the features.

We had to find stories that could be presented particularly well via charts and data graphs.

I decided to cover unemployment in the country in the run up to the chancellor’s announcements that day.

This made particularly good material for a graph as I used it to show how the levels have fluctuated accordingly to the financial crisis since 2008. The graph sort of reinforced what people will have expected, that it peaked in late 2011 and has been on a steady decline since, but we still have a long way to go before we’re back to the levels of pre-recession unemployment in 2008.

An interesting fact was that unemployment is at its lowest point since that peak in 2011, which is always a good sign.

Overall I thought the experience was rather enjoyable. It was a fairly good simulation of a news room environment.

One problem I did face was that unless I zoomed into the chart it didn’t look as though unemployment levels has changed that much. However, they had, I just couldn’t find a way to start the Y-axis at 1 as opposed to 0, which would’ve helped a lot.

Week 6: Using Storify

This week, we learned how to use an online publishing platform called Storify. The tool essentially allows you to create content whilst also making it easy to embed various types of media, from Tweets to YouTube videos.

We were given a list of current topics, such as the missing Malaysian jet and the unrest between Russia and the Crimea. We then had to choose one of the topics and write a “dry-run” feature of approximately 300 words, and include social media in it.

This acted as preparation for a 1000 word feature which we will include in our professional portfolio for assessment.

(Click here to view the feature on Storify.com)

I chose to write about the Russia and Crimea situation. Not only because I find it extremely interesting, but also because social media has played a key role in the release of news regarding the situation, and seeing as though one of Storify’s main features is the incorporation of social media into stories, it made sense to go for this topic.

Overall, I was surprised at how good Storify is. It presents an easy, straightforward method of incorporating social media and links into your stories, something that can sometimes be a bit more complicated when you have to use HTML.

Week 5: Social Media Optimisation

This week we’ve looked at how we can use social media to maximise our potential audience for content we write.

I had already used social media for content promotion at past work placements. This involved using SEO and also looking at peak times for tweeting, as well as scheduling posts, which we covered again in this seminar.

Another tool which I found interesting to look at was Tweriod. Tweriod gives you an online analysis of your activity on Twitter. It tells you when you are most active and when most of your followers are online, allowing you to carefully schedule the best time to send out a tweet.

I then looked at five different ways to find influential and interesting journalists to follow to make using Twitter more beneficial to myself in the professional world, as opposed to the selfie-filled world most of us are used to.

Tweepi.com

Tweepi is a useful platform for not only cleaning up your followers list but also finding new people to follow. One useful tool it boasts is the ability to find followers for you. As you can see in the image above, it can find followers similar to ones you’re already following. If your ‘role model’, as Tweepi says, is a journalist, then it can find other journalists that that person is following. It also takes advantage of Twitter’s list function which is a way of users collating the tweets of several other Twitter users and having a single and separate interface with them all on.

Twitter.com search

One of the most obvious ways of finding fellow Tweeters who could be useful is Twitter’s built-in search function. Search any word and Twitter will give you back a list of tweets that include that word. If you search ‘journalism’, you will often find that the majority of tweets are from the actual journalists themselves. The first tweets shown are from those with the most retweets or followers, but thereafter, it’s simply a live feed that constantly updates.

As well as a live feed of tweets, it also brings up a tab with the most relevant users relating to the searched word. As you can see above, searching ‘journalism’ resulted in Twitter recommending I follow www.journalism.co.uk.

Journalism.co.uk – 100 Twitter accounts every journalism student should follow

This is a great place to start if you want a quick and simple way of finding journalists to follow and you don’t already follow anybody. Journalism.co.uk has collated this list, 100 Twitter accounts every journalism student should follow, which gives a straight-forward list of who journalism students should be following.

Google

One useful way of finding fellow journalists, which I had encountered before, is to search ““a public list” site:twitter.com <journalism>”. Doing this returns results which show lists of writers who work for each of the publications.

TIME Magazine – Journalists to follow on Twitter

TIME Magazine published a list of the ‘best Twitter feeds’. On that list were several journalists, which Poynter have then gone on to single out and put onto their own list to make it easier for journalists to find other journalists.

Week 4 – Part 2: News Gathering

The second part of this week’s seminar was focusing on gathering content to upload onto our portfolios.

Having worked for several publications, I’m fortunate in that I have a varied portfolio, from writing for Digital Spy to interviewing guests at the O2 Media Awards.

One thing I will have to spend time thinking about, which I have also mentioned on my Trello list, is how to collate over online 170 articles in a way that is easily navigable and presentable.

I also have video footage from when I interviewed guests at the O2 Media Awards. This was uploaded onto YouTube and embedded onto the O2 website, so putting this video onto my own portfolio should be fairly straight-forward.

I will also be uploading copies of the business magazine from Newsdays 1 as it shows another side of my writing in business journalism. For this, I’ve started scanning in the work and saving it on my computers.

One other skill I’d like to showcase on the portfolio is my work on InDesign. For my Magazine Project, I created a magazine called Hitch&Pitch which was very technical in term’s of the design work, so it’s a good opportunity to show it off. I also helped design the aforementioned business magazine, so I can also incorporate that work into the same section.

Week 4 – Part 1: Action Planning

This week, we started to plan out what steps we need to take to put together our professional portfolio.

This was particularly useful for me as I often find myself getting side-tracked. I used a platform called Trello which allows you to create comprehensive to-do lists, and tick them off as you complete each task.

As mentioned in the blog post before, I had already made a start on creating a homepage for my portfolio, meaning I was one-step ahead and that I could put a couple of actions straight into the ‘completed’ list, such as ‘sign up to Moonfruit’.

As you can see from the list, Trello presents a clear, navigable option for action-planning, allowing you to easily drag and drop each activity to the corresponding column.