What Skills Do Freelance Journalists Need in 2022?
2022 is a different animal than almost any other time in recent memory. On the heels of a (hopefully) receding pandemic that forced our lives indoors and online for the better part of two years, the world is starting to appreciate and acknowledge just how far our advancements in things like technology, information sharing etc. have come, and to utilize those things more directly in parts of our everyday lives they never would have been before. Eye exams for one’s driver’s license can be accomplished online now. Most jobs are able to be done in a combination of remote and in-person work. It’s a completely different world than 2019 had in store for us.
Naturally, the role of the journalist and the tools available to them have changed as well in these past couple of years. Identifying what, exactly, is different, and what skills we must go about building in the face of those differences, is tantamount to making sure our role as journalists remains useful to society.
THE POSSIBILITIES OF REMOTE WORK
This is the biggest perspective change most of society has had since 2019. Whereas pre-COVID, office cultures and open-concept workplaces were all the rage, now most jobs have found they can save money on office space and keep their employees happier by working remotely. For journalists, this offers a number of different possibilities. For one, you can work wherever you’d like to. This no longer means that you need to reside in major metropolitan areas to get connections to enviable newsrooms. If a New York Times correspondent can be hired from a beach in California, that works out pretty well for all parties involved.
ONLINE CONTENT
Journalists are their own salespeople and are constantly marketing their voices. As a result of humanity having dived so deeply into its computer screens, people now almost implicitly expect any person alive today to have some form of online content; whether this is a podcast, a YouTube channel, a blog, or a Twitter. Journalists may find themselves under increasing pressure to utilize these platforms to their greatest extremes in order to make themselves more relevant on the web.
This is important: content matching the quality and caliber of your work being readily available online both broadens your discoverability and brings in the possibility for several streams of income.
Journalists are too often paid a pittance in return for their work, and having more than one stream of income will be lifesaving.
BRANDING
This word makes most people convulse when they hear it. Branding, most often associated with influencers, makes people think of cringey “live-laugh-love” Instagram posts about nothing. The reality is that branding is a lot simpler and, in actuality, a lot more subconsciously important than even influencers give it credit for. Branding is simply “the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design.” A journalist’s product is two-fold; it is both the information contained within the pieces the journalist writes and the “packaging,” or the way in which the journalist presents that piece in their carefully crafted voice. Therefore, branding begins when you publish your first piece.
If your branding is all over the place; for example, a journalist following up an independent blog post about the horrors of the war in Ukraine with one about their favorite recipe for chocolate chip cookies, that sends conflicting and confusing messages about the information you will be presenting as well as the way in which you will be giving it to us. Clarity and consistency across your published online content is key.
CULTIVATING RELATED (BUT RELEVANT) SKILLS
Journalism is the marriage of several skill sets to create a unique kind of information sharing. Any and all of these skill sets are valuable on their own.
For example, copywriting,
Copywriting employs sales tactics along with language skills in order to create persuasive, concise content with the intent of generating sales. Copywriting is a great way to learn persuasive tactics to market your own work.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a set of data points that can be gleaned from any piece to make it more searchable on things like Google or Yahoo. Cultivating that skill will make your own work easier and more accessible online for readers and potential employers.
Photography and photojournalism insert a visual element for the brain to play with that is intrinsically tied to a journalists’ “packaging.” Even just the act of taking a photograph and reflecting on it may give the journalist some insight into how their own brain works enough for them to develop their voice further. Plus, these are all available as additional income streams–never a bad thing for a journalist.
In sum, multi-hyphenates appear to be the new working people in the 21st century. Whether or not you identify as just a journalist or as a journalist-photographer-podcaster, there’s no doubt that humanity is being called upon to excel at several skill sets at once to make their mark in our new, technologically advanced age.
