Bridging TPC and Journalism: It’s for the Audience

The audience can suck. If you’re in any field where you’re communicating a message to a group of people, you know this. They never seem to make up their mind. Some days they want this and other days the opposite.

But the audience is why we in media have a job. In both journalism and technical communication, audience is a primary focus – and each field can learn a little bit about how to best serve the audience from the other.

Make it easy on them eyes

Tech. comm. can teach journalism to ask the question, “How do I make this information effortless for my audience to consume?”

There’s a reason TPC majors at Cedarville take graphic design classes. We need to know how to design our quick start guides, manuals, and websites so that the audience can get the information they need without thinking about it.

In journalism, sometimes we care too much about doing journalism for ourselves and not for our audience. We can write this 1,500 word piece that we throw on our website with no subheadings or multimedia content to break it up. That is not easy for the audience to digest.

One of these is easy to read. And the other is, well, not.

On a need-to-know basis

On the other hand, journalism can remind TPC to remember to ask the following question: What does the audience need to know?

In my breaking new story on the president of Cedarville’s announcement that he is resigning, I didn’t include his full name in the lead – everybody at Cedarville knows the president as Dr. Brown.

But the Dayton Daily News used William E. Brown’s full name in the lead of their story.

In TPC, we can often give too much detail when we don’t need to.  In instructions for saving an InDesign doc as a PDF, I don’t need to tell a group of 20-somethings what mouse button to click when they click “File.” They know the basics of using a computer.

Yes, the audience can be by fickle and critical. But if we want do our job and do it well, we must remember them.

More on Bridging TPC and Journalism

Bridging TPC and Journalism: It Can be Done

Bridging TPC and Journalism: Writing

Bridging TPC and Journalism: Creating Creative Media