Julie Starr
Time has flown so quickly since the Witt School of Journalism went up to Wintec in Hamilton, to hear online-journalism genius Julie Starr give a presentation on online media.
Julie has worked in the media for the last 20 years, and in that time she’s been a reporter, sub-editor, page layout sub, chief sub-editor, radio presenter, workflow specialist, change agent and editorial manager. That’s a lot of roles!
She was at Wintec on Wednesday talking about the role of media on the web, and how right now, is the most exciting time to be involved with journalism. I couldn’t agree more! We looked at examples of news web pages, like stuff.co.nz. And the things they do wrong – for example, how often do you visit a Stuff page and find news that is weeks, possibly months out of date? It happens all the time for me, and it’s frustrating when you want to read something new. After all, isn’t that what news is about?
Also she confirmed what I thought – people don’t care about multimedia. They don’t wake up and think “Oh I’d better check the daily news multimedia page”. I’ve never cared for videos, quizzes (even though they are popular), or interactive timelines on Stuff.co.nz. I visit the site to read the news, not watch it.
We heard all about twitter, facebook, blogs, and RSS feeds. Once there was the person who would read the newspaper everyday – and after they felt a sense of “I know everything”. They read the paper, and felt like they were in the know. Now we have consumers who think “If it’s important, It’ll find me”, where news they care about pops up on their Facebook and Twitter feeds. There is no longer that feeling where you think you know everything – with the web, there are thousands of news sources and stories out there about various topics that we never had before.
There were a few different groups at Wintec for the presentation, and by far, Witt was the most engaged. Our students and tutor asked questions, laughed at jokes and raised points. I made notes on my iPhone. The Wintec group seemed quite rude, making me so thankful for choosing Witt.
On the drive back to Taranaki, we all talked about what we got out of the trip and went over the presentation again the next day in class. We all agreed we found it facinating and learnt a lot. Since Julie said Twitter is a very important tool for journalists, most of the students signed up to the site within a day. That is fantastic!
I’m going to be really interested to see where Julie, and the media go next. I feel like there is so much out there to learn about media and social media – I can’t wait to be more involved.
Thanks very much Julie for inviting us along and giving a brilliant workshop.
Until next time 
