Getting started

First steps

The first step is to put together a team of very motivated individuals that will bring the project to life and see it through. This will be the editorial ‘core’. You can also bring in regular and occasional participants to be in charge of op-eds, photos, writing jingles, person-on-the-street interviews, longer interviews, social media, uploading podcasts, and scheduling guests. Then you should draw up the roadmap to creating your media outlet and assign responsibilities according to participants’ preferences.

Coming up with a format and identity

• Ask what the aim of your media product is: Do students want to actively shape the life of their school or club? Allow as many young people as possible to express themselves? Encourage their own discussions on the topic of media?
• Determine your target audience: Students in a school? Members of a club? An entire community?
• Figuring out the tone is also vital: Should it be funny? Satirical? Investigative and research-based? Do you want the style to be more direct or more literary?
• Choosing a title (and logo) should also be taken seriously. After all, this is what will set you apart, affirm your identity, and (literally) make a name for your product.
• Finally, you need to take stock of the resources you need for your media product and desired publication frequency. The number of team members, their commitment, and their availability are major factors as well as your available equipment and budget.

Choose your media formula

To maintain the interest of your audience, draw them in, and pique their curiosity, you need to be sure that you supply information in a variety of ways.

Here are the main genres of journalism available to you:

Reports, investigations, and interview pieces are the main genres of journalism.

Editorials, op-eds, news briefs, regular columns, reviews, summaries, portrait pieces, and person-on-the-street interviews offer a wide range of options for adding variety.

Coming up with a topic

• Setting the angle

Choosing a topic is just the first step. You cannot cover every aspect of that topic, otherwise you may end up with an article that is too long, convoluted, and difficult to read. In other words, you may lose your audience. Therefore, you need to pick an angle, or point of view. You need to pick out which of the topic’s aspects you want to highlight and which ones you do not.

Example: ‘Podcasts’ is a topic, ‘women in podcasting’ is an angle.

• The six essential questions

In order to write an article, student journalists need to ask the questions Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?

Creating your media product and bringing it to life

• Simulating an editorial board:
• Setting up an editorial meeting is, firstly, a chance to bring together and introduce the various participants as well as to come up with a name.
• Secondly, the meeting is a chance to discuss the editorial line, the topics to be covered, the various possible angles, and also the formats (report, interview, debate, newsflash)

Ideally, the board should meet once a week or at some regular interval to encourage engagement.

• Assigning roles:

This is also the time to:

• Assign the roles of ‘journalist’, ‘expert’, ‘presenter’, and ‘crew’ (camera operator, editor) so everyone knows who is in charge of what.
• Give guidance to each participant to help them prepare (research, list of questions, reporting, commentary)
• Form groups of two or three based on participants’ skills and preferences
• Students will need to give their media product a visual identity:
• The instructor show students Canva (https://www.canva.com/) to create visual aids (logo, banners, illustrations, etc.).
• Instructors can also point out the tools offered by Madmagz, a newspaper (print and online) design app for young people: https://madmagz.com/ (see Sheet 17)
• Disseminating and promoting information:
• In order to increase your content’s visibility on websites like Wordpress, it is important to pay attention to additional enhancing features, such as headlines, ledes, photos, and snippets that show up on search engines.
• These features need to be eye-catching to grab readers’ attention and curiosity.
• Tags (keywords for the topics covered in the article) are also important to improve referencing.
• Social networks can be a forum of expression, a place to post content, and also a platform to raise visibility. Do not hesitate to have a presence on multiple social networks to maximise the reach of your content. Promotional texts should be short and to the point.
• Regardless of the medium or aids (photo, video, or sound) it is crucial to link to other sites.

An article that contains one or more of these features will get many more views than one that is just text with no options to interact with other platforms.

• You must also pay attention to the level of language, which should be neither too formal nor too familiar.

PRACTICAL ACTIVITIES

This lesson sheet can also be used as a basis for a media creation activity with young people.