How Journalists Can Use Canva to Supplement Their Work
Canva, for those of us who haven’t been on the internet in awhile, is one of the more popular web-based graphic design applications available for use online. Canva can be used for almost any graphic design need: it’s been used by some publications to create their featured images or to disseminate small pieces of information. Canva has become very popular among activists as a way to create information and resource guides that can easily be posted to social media. So how can journalists themselves utilize this tool?
To understand why journalists should use Canva, it’s important to understand that the way the vast majority of people are consuming news is changing. More than eight in ten Americans get their news on digital devices, and 1 in 4 of those people get their news over some sort of social media app. Now, social media very rarely allows for the full context of an article to make it into a post. Twitter limits characters; Instagram has character limits on captions and will hide the captions if they’re too long; TikTok involves very little writing whatsoever. Some journalists have risen to this challenge by creating short-form digests of their work in Canva, which can then be easily shared to one of those three mediums and consumed.
“[Since switching to Canva] we’ve been able to get to market so much faster, and our audience was there for it,” said Elizabeth Shell, the creative director for audience at USA Today, who began using Canva for this purpose in early 2021. “They were really responding to how quickly we were able to share the news and tell them the news in an engaging, social-first, visual way.”
“Our entire operation is built on Canva. We started as Canva templates, but now we do everything on Canva — our copywriting, our podcasts, videos and TikToks,” said Sam Koslowski, co-founder of The Daily Aus–Australia’s fastest growing youth media company.
The tools available on Canva are very user-friendly and catered toward making groups of informational branding that anyone consuming your content will instantly recognize. For example, Canva can make brand kits, which automatically store logos, colors, letters, fonts, and templates so that you or your newsroom don’t have to constantly build branding into every little project. And while there are plenty of default fonts and images at your disposal on the Canva backend, the service also allows users to update their own fonts and as many photos as they would like, allowing for more engaging imagery to advertise and disseminate their content.
Recently, Canva’s Visual Worksuite added even more valuable tools to the service. Canva Docs, the most ambitious of these technologies, allows users to create visual-based documents. It includes an AI component that will update and suggest prompts based on user input. It will also generate appropriate spaces for pictures, charts, and other visual aids in order to optimize experience for the reader.
Canva’s array of options are a boon for any journalist hoping to increase their engagement over social media. Even Canva’s free option contains plenty of tools to assist single, freelance journalists, but bigger plans are available to expand those options further or for teams. If journalists are willing to take on a bit of a new learning experience to learn Canva, the rewards can be great.
