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Why journos need to get grubby in PR: talkin’ to The Kids

I had the pleasure — and it really was good fun — this week to talk to a bunch of journalism students at the MediaPass Student Industry Day at Trades Hall in Melbourne, a worthy initiative of The Walkley Foundation.

As a prolific Twit, and now firmly ensconced in new media flag-waver Crikey, I was asked to speak on social media and ‘your presence online’. Conscious of not wanting to join the bloated ranks of self-declard social media experts, I stuck to what I know — using social media as a tool to engage with the industry and promote your work. I absolutely know it to be true.

Here’s some rough thoughts I sketched out and delivered to the conference:

So I want to talk about the relationship between PR and journalism. Not as you may think. I want to talk about why journalists need to engage in their own PR. How, increasingly, you are all brands that must be marketed and commoditised. How you have to sell yourself, blatantly, shamelessly, in a market that is ruthlessly competitive.

Now, let me state one thing up front. I hate PR. It’s a dark art performed by many slimy practioners. And I only say that half-flippantly. But your ability to sell yourself — to devise a PR strategy, even — to win employment is crucial. You’re going to have to get your hands dirty.

The good news is the internet and social media puts all the tools you need at your fingertips. But doing it well is a real challenge, and doing it badly will do untold damage to your reputation and employment prospects. It’s a fine line.

Leigh Sales — everyone’s favourite journalistic ranga and prolific tweeter — talks of being a ‘brand’. It’s an ugly word, and dangerously commercial for an ABC journo, but the theory is sound. She sees at least part of her job as marketeer — promoting and finding new audiences for her work. To “diversify my brand,” as she wrote online once.

Getting your work read and seen is crucial, and ever-more-so in a greatly diversified and fragmented media environment. Fewer of you will have photo by-lines in the Herald Sun, or stand-ups on the nightly news, and fewer people will be seeing them anyway. At least initially you’ll be filing for online student publications, you’ll be writing for your own blogs, you’ll be pitching stories to be paid as a freelancer. You’ll be working on mediums and publications that don’t necessarily come with built-in audiences. The onus, at least partly, will be on you to go and find them. To build audiences for your writing. And, importantly, making sure the right people are reading.

Twitter is a great start. You need to be on Twitter. Trust me. I was a cynical as many of you know doubt are. It truly is white noise so much of the time. It’s dull people doing dull things. None duller than me. But as mass media goes it’s almost all that’s left. And anybody who you will ever want to employ you is reading and participating.

It’s the place to start to build your online reputation. Don’t treat it solely as a feed for shamelessly promoted links — nobody will follow you. It needs to have personality. It needs to be provocative and funny and engaging. You need to be following interesting people, re-tweeting interesting things, posting interesting information. And always, always, it needs to make you look eminently employable. The microphone is ALWAYS hot — everything you say and do could be used as evidence. Never forget that. But don’t be afraid of it.

It is not the be-all and end-all. Twitter will not save journalism, as some may have you suggest. But as a self-marketing journalist it’s pretty powerful.

Use it to build your contacts list. Link it to your online profiles and work portfolios. Use it to drive people to the platforms you’re using to market your brand and publish your goods.

You should have a blog. There’s no excuse. When nobody will employ you, when nobody will publish your work, everyone can self-publish. Use it to compile any student or freelance work. And write well, write provocatively, write passionately about the things that interest you. Passion breeds the most compelling writing. It puts your best foot forward.

I got my job at Crikey because I nagged the powers that be to the point of annoyance. But also because they knew me. I existed in this sphere of media influence that is quickly developing online. They might have followed me on Twitter, they might have read my blog, they might have seen the online publications I was writing for; they saw me engaging with their products and participating in their community. I simply wouldn’t have got the job without it.

You cannot afford to be outside this community. You need to be incredibly, shamelessly conspicuous. You need a beachhead, a brand, a presence. And when everyone else finally catches up and joins you in the pool, you need to be more professional and, yes, more popular than anyone else. You need to sell yourself harder and faster than the rest.

At least for the moment, you need to be really good at PR. Don’t be ashamed.

These students are so much smarter and so much braver than I was at university. Their eyes are open wide to how crippled mainstream media is right now, and how much of a lottery it is trying to get a job, and yet they want to do it anyway. It’s actually pretty inspiring.

The Kids are alright…

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