Sport. Great
Who doesn’t think they would be good at lying on a sofa, sipping a beer and sounding off about their favourite game?
But that's not quite the full range of talents you need.
Maybe commentating on matches takes your fancy?
That’s one very visible aspect of sport, but it’s not what most sports journalists do most of the time.
There are many more types of sport report.
As well as live match reports (and there are plenty of those thanks to text-based ball-by-ball commentary on mobile phones) there are previews or scene setters before a game and inquest pieces after it
One major growth area is in sports news reporting. Sport is big business, as well as an obsession for many, and it can attract readers to newspapers and eyeballs to websites and broadcast news coverage.
If we take football, the finances of the clubs, the transfer fees for star players, the intrigues concerning the sport’s governing bodies, all require a solid knowledge of a sport if they are to be reported effectively.
These brands of sports reporting all require skills quite apart from those of knowing a sport and how to analyse a game or match.
Some are the skills of a general reporter, but awareness of, for example, business reporting, quickly become important.
So, here’s what we’ll look at in Masterclass 28:
How to get into it sports journalism – should you specialise early on or get general news reporting experience first?
What you’ll need to know about what sports
Examples of how to report throughout the sports news cycle
The skills of the commentator
How to make stories about a particular sport of interest to a general audience
How to learn from the very best sports writers and broadcasters around
University courses in sports journalism
The link below will take you to the first of seven modules, which will be available for a few days for non-subscribers to MMJ, and for good if you have bought the textbook Multimedia Journalism, A Practical Guide and activated your account usign the access key you'll fidn in the paper textbook, or in the Kindle edition
Location is the fastest growing aspect of communication
Providing location-specific content holds out huge opportunities – and challenges – for journalists and publishers
How do we harness the potential of geo-location for our journalism, whether we are working in hyperlocal, local, B2B, specialist or any other media?
Whatever your beat or specialism, the exponential growth in the use of smartphones and other mobile, wi-fi enabled devices, means that we must look at ways we can make our content relevant to our users when they are on the move.
Mobile devices offer consumers information that is tailored to where they are, and what they want to do, right now. We need to put our own content on the leading mobile platforms.
The challenge to local media: Geolocate or die
The message to local media companies is: geo-locate or die. Or, perhaps more acurately, continue to fade.
For any local journalist, or local publisher of a blog, hyperlocal news site, or local newspaper then the question of locality is central to what they do.
Newspapers were, once upon a time, the best way to get information to those in a particular locality.
What geo-location does is bring a massive advance in the opportunities to do that.
The challenge for any local journalist or publisher is to ride this development.
If you don’t, if those in your area can’t immediately find information from you that is relevant to where they are and what they are doing, or want to do, than you are failing as a provider of local content and information.
I don’t see many local papers getting abreast of this. I do see some pioneering hyperlocal sites and blogs doing it.
What geo-location platforms to use?
At the moment there is a competing array of localising platforms out there.
You can’t build your own and you wouldn’t want to if you could.
What you can do is see which platforms people are beginning to use, and find out whether you can get your content on them.
That’s our aim in this masterclass.
Are they on Foursquare, for example, and could you use Foursquare as a platform for reaching people?
We’ll look at the breakthrough one hyperlocal site, BlogPreston, has made using this platform. What about Gowalla, another check-in site that lets you create local journeys?
There are other potential publishing platforms that are far less well known, and I’ll be demonstrating some of them, including a very promising one called Bubbleby which I think has great potential for local journalists because it lets you create content and community – in what it calls bubbles – around a particular location.
Great for campaigning, or focusing discussion on a particular distinct area in the town you cover.
Mapping platforms
Then there are the various mapping platforms that enable you to put information on a map of the area you cover and then embed those information-laden maps into your website or blog. We looked at using Google Maps as a backdrop to a feature on pages 417-8 of the book version of MMJ, and here: http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/98 on the web version.
We’ll look at a range of other ways of exploiting the potential of mapping in local journalism.
Build your own GeoGuide
There is the opportunity, from a company called Geodelic, to create a guide to a particular area, called a GeoGuide, that can be read on a Blackberry, iPhone or Android smartphone.
We’ll look at Geodelic, on which I’m building a guide.
The GeoGuide I’m building is not local in the local paper sense, but locality is important to it. It’s an app that brings together the best places to train as a multimedia journalist in the UK. It’s a work in progress but we’ll look at how far I’ve got with it.
GeoGuides could be useful to any editor of a magazine where location can be relevant to some of the title’s content. A golfing mag, for example, might have a GeoGuide to the best courses and cluster a lot of relevant information around those venues. Any specialist-interest magazine could create GeoGuides.
Here are some thoughts:
A business travel mag might create a guide to each major airport.
A fishing mag could let readers see which is the best river or lake close to where they find themselves.
Real ale fans can be told where to get a pint of Owld Scroat in the strange town they happen to be visiting.
How to explore the potential of geo-location for your journalism
Mashable said this about geo-located content in its predictions for 2011:
“In 2010, we saw the growth of location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla and SCVNGR. Even Facebook entered the location game by launching its Places product, and Google introduced HotPot, a recommendation engine for places and began testing it in Portland. The reality is that only 4% of online adults use such services on the go. My guess is that as the information users get on-the-go info from such services, they’ll becomes more valuable and these location-based platforms will attract more users.
“Part of the missing piece is being able to easily get geo-tagged news content and information based on your GPS location. In 2011, with a continued shift toward mobile news consumption, we’re going to see news organisations implement location-based news features into their mobile apps. And of course if they do not, a start-up will enter the market to create a solution to this problem or the likes of Foursquare or another company will begin to pull in geo-tagged content associated with locations as users check in.”
So how do we get on the bandwagon and use geo-location on our website, blogs and in the apps we create?
That’s the question this masterclass explores. It won’t give you all the answers, but it will point to some promising possibilities.
There will be some suggested projects along the way, to give you some starting points.
And, as ever, if you do experiment in this area, you must feel free to share what you have discovered with the MMJ community by clicking on any of the comment buttons and sending us a link.
Masterclass 13: Careers in journalism, an overview and update
What's right for you: consumer magazines, business mags, TV, radio, local papers, hyperlocal, or self-employment?
We're all multimedia journalists now, but the simple truth is that the people handing out the jobs are still - predominantly - operating in one of the traditional media categories. We'll look at how to pick the area that best suits you, and how to demonstrate in your application, and at interview, how good you'll be at enhancing the multimedia capabilities of anyone who gives you a job.
We'll also cover working as a freelance, and the opportunities that developments in hyperlocal are opening up.
Going live: September 20
Masterclass 14: How to pass the NCTJ Newswriting Diploma exam
A guide to what examiners are looking for, and a sure-fire approach to the exam
We'll cover the golden rules you need to follow to convince NCTJ markers that you are a safe pair of hands, hear from those with enviable records in getting student journalists through the exam, and offer a step-by-step approach to the exam that will maximise your marks.
Going live: September 24
October 2010
Masterclass 15: iPhone for Journalists
Smartphones are a highly convenient way for the multimedia journalist to publish instantly
We'll look at how to turn your iPhone into a fully-enabled multimedia reporting device, so you can file text, stills, video and audio instantly to a custom-made blog, to a mobile-enabled multimedia site, and any combination you like of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and a huge range of other platforms.
We're concentrating on the iPhone, but what we cover is also applicable to other smartphones.
Going live: October 16
Masterclass 16: A new struture for online, multimedia story-telling
Has the traditional inverted triangle/pyramid had it's day?
With multimedia content, combining material from other sources and linking, the simple story structure journalists have been taught for generations needs some refining.
Going live: October 30
November 2010
Masterclass 17: Topic areas and beat blogs
How to make your website a valuable resource and attract loyal users.
We've concentrated a good deal in these masterclasses on how to reach out to new audiences with the effective use of a wide range of social media. The goal was always to draw readers who appreciate what you are doing back to your branded website and print publication.
Now we look at how to make that website as effective as it can be at turning casual visitors into committed and regular consumers of our content.
Going live: November 13
Masterclass 18: NCTJ Multimedia Portfolio
What the examiners are looking for in your multi-platform news and features
Going live: November 27
December 2010
Masterclass 19: Curating user-generated content
How to cover a major story by blending your own material with that from other professional and citizen journalists
Masterclass 20: Hyperlocal reporting and geotagging
Industry experts with the latest guidance
January 2011
Masterclass 21: Travel writing
An experienced travel writer on how to do it right
Masterclass 22: Email bulletins
How to turn an RSS feed into a bulletin, and add your Twitter feed to it
February 2011
Masterclass 23: Social media update
What platforms you should be using now – and how
Masterclass 24: Features writing
Analysing how the very best features writers do it
March 2011
Masterclass 25: The jobs market
Industry experts on where the opportunities lie right now
Sir Ray Tindle, owner of the 230-title Tindle Newspapers group, shrugs off assertions that 50 per cent of the press will be dead within five years, and says: “The local weekly press is rock solid, with revenue rising again and looking forward to another 200 years of serving their readers.”
Sir Ray was speaking at the Local Heroes conference, organised by Press Gazette and Kingston University.
Sir Ray says he’s been hearing about the dire state of the press for 63 years, and makes a strong case for why it will survive and thrive.
Find out more about what local papers can offer the trainee journalist in Masterclass 10 at www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk
