Journalists: What elements to include in your porfolio career

Here's Adam Westbrook's advice on putting your portfolio together: "Ask yourself 'what is it about being a journalist that I really love', and then try and build a business around that."

You'll find a great deal more about building your own job, entrepreneurialism and portfolio careers in Masterclass 12 at Multimedia Journalism: A Practical Guide's web-version: www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk 

Here are some of the recommendations he comes up with:
Specialise in a single journalistic skill
For example, an expert in Freedom of Information requests (think HelpMeInvestigate) and investigations (think the Investigative Journalism Bureau).
Aggregate the news
Journalism professor Clay Shirky says: “If I was going to set up a news business tomorrow, it would be a business designed to create not one bit of content.”
Adam says: "You can build a business like Mashable or TechCrunch has done. They have aggregated, but built on top so they are the home page of tech news. If it's happened in that field, you’ll get it on those sites, and they build their own spin on top of it."
There are other areas of specialist content where this hasn’t been done yet.
Make a niche work
Forget broadcasting to the many – think connecting with the few.
You only need a thousand followers who will pay for your content to earn a living.
It needs to be a niche that really matters to that audience and you must become the place to go for information about it.
Launch a journalism collaborative
The most famous one – Magnum Photos - was a collaborative of  photojournalists who re-wrote the rules of the game in the mid 20th century.
Magnum was born out of the Leica, a cheap, portable camera, and innovative people such as Cartier Bresson
There are parallels today, where multimedia technology is simpler and cheaper than it ever has been. Creating and publishing  is very straightforward and it's easy to innovate.
Examples from the US:

• MediaStorm

• Story4

• Bombay Flying Club

Examples from the UK:

• Not on the wires

• Duck Rabbit

Hyperlocal
The major groups are struggling: "They had a business model that required 30 per cent returns, and are having to lay off journalists to try to maintain that profit margin.
"A hyperlocal start-up can run on a much smaller margin. They can cut costs not by paying the journalist nothing but by not having to pay for a big office and a massive printing press."
So if you can really serve a community, keep your costs low, you can fill the gap that has been left by the retreat of the big-groups’ titles.

How Google Wave could become the multimedia publishing platform of choice

Next month Google Wave goes live to those who’ve signed up to test it out. Why should journalists care? Specifically, B2B journalists?

Because wave just might be the platform that enables us to do easily  what we aspire to in multimedia journalism: to work collaboratively, bring all media together in one place, and enter into a full conversation with our readers – who in B2B are often a pool of experts.

So what is wave? Well, that’s harder to explain that to demonstrate, so you might want to watch Google’s own video demo.




Or there’s Wikipedia’s definition which reads in part: “It is a web based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus.”

As Google themselves put it: "A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."

You can check out all it can do at Mashable or Techcrunch

My interest was sparked by a series of questions from Paul Conley He believes wave could be “the thing that may push the entire business world into a more collaborative, more conversational mode -- creating the situation where all industries can report on themselves".

The vital questions he asks are: “Can a news story be a wave? Can trade show coverage be a wave? Can a recurring feature or major issue in the industries we write about be a wave? What does that look like? Who participates?"

We can’t know the answers yet – although I’d hazard a yes in answer to the first three -- but come September 30 we can begin to experiment.

Here’s my take on the most interesting aspects of wave as it relates to journalism.

A wave as an editorial brainstorming, conferencing and editing tool

You can use waves to collaboratively author documents. So instead of, say, sending notes from a meeting out either in an email or putting them into a wiki for collaboration, you can do both at the same time.  

Wave offers a mix of collaborative editing and online discussion – you just add the people who you want to collaborate with on a wave. Everyone on the wave can make changes, those changes will be trackable back to them, and the original author can accept or reject what they like. Once they are happy, they can publish it. 

So an editorial team could privately discuss coverage, assign reporting tasks and pull that material, once created, together for editing.   

Once edited and approved, the material could be put into a new wave – a public wave -- that can be distributed to a much wider group of wave participants.

Reporting collaboratively in a wave, using all media 

Say you are covering a major story, or a conference, trade show or convention. A public wave – or one with a limited invited audience, as is appropriate – can be your platform. 

And it’s multimedia. 

Attachments can be dragged and dropped into the wave – pictures for example. All members of the wave conversation can throw their photos in and they become part of one collective slide show.

A Wave is a hub of conversations that is constant and can be returned to by any number of people and updated by them all, and read by them all, at any time. It's like a mix of instant messenger and email; any wave participant can highlight an element of a message and respond directly to that bit.

So on a major breaking news story, the output from a range of reporters, plus citizen journalists and participants, can be pulled into the one wave.  

At a major event, any number and range of participants can pool their knowledge, expertise, comment and reporting in a single wave that can be the hub of coverage for that event.

A wave as a universal, multimedia publishing platform
 
You can embed waves in your web pages, into a blog, on discussion group sites, community forums, and you can let users discuss the content using waves that they create. 

Any individual web user can aggregate the wave conversations they are interested in and keep tabs on them all easily. They can bring them into the wave client so they don’t have to go hunting for them all over the place.