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

Journalism with Google Drive: Collaboration on the Big Ones

As I mentioned in a previous post, Google Drive has lately been my tool of choice for journalistic collaboration. Not only can Google Drive be a great tool for co-authoring stories with another reporter, it can also be great for collaborating on major issues that take multiple people and multiple stories to cover.

At my university, the president recently announced that he is stepping down at the end of this school year to serve as a chancellor. He announced this on the day all of the content for our November issue was due. However, considering this was the biggest story any of us would ever cover as student journalists, we knew we had to put our current plans for November on hold and deliver some great content on the president’s decision.

The story involved multiple reporters producing multiple stories. Even though some of us needed to interview the same person, we couldn’t all do so. So I started a Google Doc. on Google Drive where reporters could post who they were interviewing so that other reporters could then enter questions they wanted that reporter to ask the interviewee.

I shared this document with all reporters involved in this project. We put in a lot of hard, long hours on the November issue (which came out about a week ago), and Google Drive played a small role in helping us put out a great issue. Check it out.