Tip #10 Talk To Strangers

In my street we have had two postmen in recent years. Sam was older than Simon. My guess is that Simon has probably spent more time in education than Sam. They were both polite and efficient and we have never had any complaints. The difference is that Sam loved to chat to everyone in the street and to know what was going on, while Simon was more shy and worked his way down the road with his iPod headphones plugged into his ears. There may be nothing to choose between them as postmen, but I know who would make the better reporter.

There is no doubt that the iPod is a wonderful invention and I’m amazed by how much the iPhone can do, but new technology will never replace traditional people skills and when you are a hunter-gatherer looking for news, ear plugs can be a distraction.

In the most extreme manifestation of social withdrawal coupled with technological obsession, Japanese psychiatrists have identified cases of hikikomori, where teenagers will retreat to their bedrooms for years at a time. That’s not a great place to launch your career as a reporter.

Journalists can find out what is going on by using Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, but this must be coupled with a deep-seated desire to mix with people in person.

Sam the postman certainly has this desire and he also has another advantage over many of us and that is in the way he travels. Sam spends most of his working day either walking or riding his bike. You see far more on foot, or on a bike, than you do cocooned in a car, or trapped in a tube train, and you have more opportunities to meet fellow travellers and to find out what they are up to.

Of course walking takes more time and so does stopping to chat to people. However, if you build in the extra time in your day and you learn to make small talk with strangers, you will quickly find that chatter is every bit as effective as Twitter and all the other so-called social media sites put together.

Tell people you are a journalist, get into the habit of carrying a calling card you can hand out to them and give them the time of day when you see them and you will find that slowly, but surely, the man in the newsagent, or the woman in the park will start to call you and let you know what’s going on.

The writer Bill Bryson started his  journalism career at the Daily Echo in Bournemouth, where Up To Speed is based today. His witty travel writing is based on the people he meets and the observations he makes about the world he travels through. His best-selling book Notes From A Small Island is a wonderful portrait of Britain in the mid-90s and it has sold over 1.5 million copies. Bryson’s notes were all made while travelling around the country on foot or by public transport. And he spent a great deal of that time, not in solitary reflection, but talking to strangers.

Why not take a leaf out of his book, and follow in his footsteps.

Tom Hill of Up To Speed

All the journalism students on Up To Speed’s NCTJ courses at the Daily Echo in Bournemouth create their own blogs and update them throughout the course.
So, I thought it would be a good idea to give a simple guide to the steps a journalist needs to take to start their own site and start blogging.
Step 1: Word Press
Go To Wordpress
You can then do one of two things:
a. create a free blog which will have wordpress in the url. This is what the url for the Apostrophe Ape site I set up looks like: http://apostropheape.wordpress.com/.
b. Pay a small amount of money to set up your own domain name.
It is reasonably easy to create your own free blog through Wordpress and so I won’t take you through that process here today. However, it is worth saying that you should spend a bit of time selecting a name, which includes keywords you think people will use to search for the kind of things you will be writing about.
Step 2: 123-reg.co.uk Domain Name Search and Registration
To find out if your preferred domain name is available. Go to 123-regand use their simple search form to see if the name is free or already taken. I put in url bournemouthjournalism.co.uk and found that the domain name was available and this it would cost £5.98 for two years. It is a good idea to go for a .co.uk suffix if you are hoping to attract readers from the UK as this will be more visible in Google UK searches.
Step 3: Media Temple Web Hosting
There are a number of web hosting companies. I use one called Media Temple, because it was recommended by a friend. Once you have registered the domain name with Media Temple you will receive an email, which includes details of Media Temple’s nameservers.
Step 4: Change Nameservers
What you then have to do is to log into your 123.reg page, then click View Domains and then click on Change Nameservers. Then paste in the details of your Media Temple Nameservers.
It can take two to three working days for the Nameservers to start pointing at Media Temple.
Step 5: In your Media Temple account you will see that there is a section called One-click applications. Click there to point your Media Temple domain to Wordpress.
Tip: Sometimes you may find that you have to go into the File Manager section and add .old to the name of your existing domain in order for the link with Wordpress to work.
Step 6: You can then create your own blog and start posting straight away. Alternatively, you can spend a little time selecting a new Theme to change the appearance of the site and also adding widgets such as Twitter or a tag cloud to your front page.
Step: 7 Add plug-ins.
There are hundreds of plug-ins you can add to your site to make the content more dynamic and interesting.
Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog has some excellent tips on this.
Step 8: Add images, videos and other media to your site. I have created two YouTube films showing you how to do this, which you can see on Up To Speed’s You Tube page.