What is Digital Journalism? Why should you consider it?
Digital journalism is a little different from traditional journalism. Apart from the core journalistic rules, the students of digital journalism are trained in many other digital skills in order to compete with the competition.
What is digital journalism?
It can be very difficult to define digital journalism in one sentence, however, broadly we can say that any form of journalistic content posted on the internet is a form of digital journalism. The content can be in any form – text, audio, image or video. Distribution of content on the internet is much faster than traditional media. In digital media, different forms of media such as – text, image, audio, video, graphics etc. are often clubbed together to make content informative as well as entertaining. Users are kept up-to-date with latest information through breaking news web/wap notification, push notification, social media alerts, live news coverage etc.
Skills required to become a digital journalist
Anyone who aspires to become a digital journalist should have good communication, critical thinking and quick problem-solving skills. One should be able to gather information from various sources on the internet and should be familiar with social media platforms and usage. A lot of digital journalists use social media as their main source of information. Journalists also post their content on social media using hashtags (#) to expand the audience reach and to track their story or analyse the popularity of their posts. Web analytics tools are also used to analyse website traffic, real-time users, pageviews, trending topics and top performing articles.
Why should you consider digital journalism?Digital content creators are redefining the way communication is distributed in media. If you like the idea of tweeting breaking news; pushing notifications on mobile phones; fleshing out instant alerts, live blogging major events; shooting and editing exciting videos, creating content for social media platforms etc. you should consider a degree course or training in Digital Journalism.
The demand for digital content creators is more nowadays as compared to traditional journalists. A degree in digital journalism will expand your job opportunities and prepare you for the future.
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by Rajni Pandey
source: The Times of India
