Is My Future Setting Sale?
- ashleighdwan
- Aug 22, 2016
- 3 min read
When one of the most powerful women in Australian journalism tells you to have a back up plan and opt for another qualification alongside your journalism degree, you start to wonder why you got yourself into the position in the first place.
The talented Leigh Sales, anchor of the ABC's 7:30 Report and one half of the Sales/Crabb "Chat 10 Looks 3" podcast duo, joined our Online Journalism lecture last week.
Please tell me the incorrect spelling of 'sale' makes sense now.
It was an event not to be missed with many of my classmates turning to Twitter to express their excitement over Leigh and their disappointment for the exam that followed (it was a speed vs accuracy test that was worth 20% of my overall grade and to be completely honest I am already stressing over the result).
Anyway, I want to spend the next few hundred words talking about what I made of Leigh's comments following an hour spent in her company.
I am attempting to calm my own nerves and justify why I think it's perfectly fine to enter the post Uni world with a single undergraduate Bachelor of Journalism. It's not that I didn't consider a dual degree and have my eye on the law and business opportunities, but I just could not justify studying for an extra couple of years whist adding more money on to my HECS debt, just so that I could be over qualified doing something I wasn't overly interested in.
When asked to give aspiring journalists some advice, Leigh plainly said that we should look at specialising and get some other qualification that compliments journalism. She mentioned her favourite was medicine, as she loves reading work from medical/journalism practitioners.
I think @JoshCheadle20 did an amazing edit of Dr Sales, maybe he should look into photojournalism as a specialty.
Twitter understandably blew up and students studying double degrees were giving each other virtual high fives. I wasn't overly impressed and dwelled on it for quite a while. It made me a little angry to think I am whole-heartedly putting my absolute best into this degree rather than hedging my bets to tackle two at the same time and struggle to fall in love with either occupation.
It's Leigh's understanding that as the world of media changes journalists will have to specialise in order to be across different topics. She believes being particularly skilled in a certain area will be the most advantageous in securing the few jobs offered. Likewise, she said news is moving towards opinion as there is more of an emphasis on people's thoughts and ideas rather than straight facts.
This brings me to the topic of podcasts. Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb run their own, which is rather successful. In fact, this was one of the main reasons we were chatting with Leigh as the unit surrounds everything online related. She expressed her ideals of what makes a good podcast, that being in the way it sounds.
"The manner of a podcast delivery is very conversational," she stated.
It is as if her listeners are her friends, very different to her role on the 7:30 Report. Although, it is still some sort of performance and there has to be chemistry between the two people delivering it. The strength of listening to two strangers talk about anything is that it should feel like you are talking with them rather than being talked to.
This shift of interactivity and interaction with your audience is what drives the new era of media and indeed multimedia storytelling. There is now an abundance of interactive and highly engaging online stories that use new tools to help tell a story. It's now more than just words and pictures but a combination of all different kinds of audio, vision, data and interaction that create a successful online piece.
I have decided to link a few stories that epitomise what it means to tell engaging stories. I have chosen the following based on what they involve (for example, stunning visuals, embedded videos, overlaying scroll images and audience interaction).
3. 2014: The Year in Interactive Storytelling (The New York Times does an amazing job of compiling interactive stories, the 2015 edition is great too)
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