On the 20^th of March, I listened to a talk from Oli Hills, the Managing Director of Updates Media. Hills described Updates Media as a collection of advert-free local news pieces. A focal point of Hills’ talk was based around how Updates Media attempts to do journalism in what was referred to as the ‘correct’ way. Part of this was the focus on what the company avoid doing. Hills states that, as the company page is advert-free, revenue does not come from on-page traffic and therefore deceptive practices such as click baiting can be avoided. Click baiting is the “intentional act of over-promising or otherwise misrepresenting… what you’re going to find when you read a story on the web”. (TechCrunch, 2016) The purpose of this practice is to mislead audiences into viewing a web page and gaining more traffic. As Updates Media does not monetise web traffic, click baiting is not a practice used at all. Furthermore, Hills stated that a key goal of Updates Media was to tailor news to their audience. One method for doing this is, with social media posts, Updates Media avoid using long articles of jargon-heavy text, instead opting for simplified, shorter updates which audiences can view quickly within their potentially busy day-to-day lives. The intention of this is that audiences are able to see news updates without it interfering in their everyday activities. This talk provided valuable insight into careers in the media. A learning point that I have taken from this is that journalists not only have to write a news story, but also must be able to figure out a way to engage audiences correctly, with some even considering morals such as not misleading an audience. In addition, I have decided that I need to learn how to be more concise as this means that my written pieces may be easier to read without losing any of their credibility.

References:

TechCrunch (2016) WTF is clickbait? [online] available from <https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/25/wtf-is-clickbait/> [20 March 2020]