The more I travel, and the more journalists I work with, the more I believe we’re a single ‘tribe’. We are motivated by the same things: great stories, told well, for a clear target audience, which adhere to specific values on ethics, accuracy and trust.

Corinne Podger is Director and Principal at The Digital Skills Agency, and is one of the world’s leading mobile journalism experts, and has taught thousands of people over the last 7 years on how to create content using smartphones.

What are you known for?
We provide professional digital multimedia, social media and media relations skills training and consultancy for businesses, universities, NGOs and media development agencies. We are specialists in ‘mobile journalism’ – teaching people how to use smartphones to capture and edit video, podcasts and photography with a smartphone for their websites and social platforms.

How did you become a subject matter expert in the field of mobile journalism?
I worked as a journalist for the BBC and ABC for 20 years before moving into training. In 2010, I was working on a science programme at ABC Radio National, and heard about an app that anyone could use to record and send audio with a phone. This was mind-blowing, because up to that point you’d have to physically travel to someone to interview them if you wanted audio quality better than a phone call. It was incredibly time-consuming and expensive. With an app, anyone – anywhere in the world – could send broadcast-quality audio over the internet.

So I was hooked! In 2012, I left the ABC and moved to London to focus on journalism education and training. I worked with the external-facing training divisions of Reuters and then with the BBC, and established my own consultancy, specialising all along the way in mobile journalism. Over the past 7 years I’ve trained around 3,000 people in over 20 countries to use smartphones to create multimedia content.

What’s the future of journalism, particularly as it relates to on-the-ground methodology in developing countries?
The more I travel, and the more journalists I work with, the more I believe we’re a single ‘tribe’. We are motivated by the same things: great stories, told well, for a clear target audience, which adhere to specific values on ethics, accuracy and trust. The means by which we achieve this vary depending on which genre of journalism we’re working (e.g. newspapers versus television), and on where we live.

Journalists in developing countries are no different to journalists in industrialised countries; but some of the challenges they face are different. First, the budget for equipment and production systems is often lower. Second, the audience may not have access to the internet – and in the digital age this throws up challenges for both production and distribution.

Again, smartphones are superbly useful on both sides of this equation. They make the job of creating and distributing content more affordable; and the growing affordability of smartphones and internet data makes it easier for the audience to access that content, and engage with it, turning the relationship between newsrooms and audiences from one of ‘broadcast’ to ‘dialogue’ and ‘collaboration’.

Define ‘media’:
I don’t know that ‘media’ is a helpful word anymore. It helps to remember that ‘media is the plural of ‘medium’ – a word that has a completely different meaning if used by an artist than a journalist. If used in a digital context, the word can mean ‘news outlets’ or it can mean ‘multimedia files’.  It’s not a meaningless word; on the contrary we invest a lot in these five letters.

What advice would you give new entrants into the Australian media and creative arts industry given, all things considered, how quickly it’s changing?
Master as many hard skills as you can, with a focus on those that are the most transportable between jobs. Being able to shoot and edit video is essential. Being able to use industry-standard software programs like Premiere and Final Cut. Understanding the back end of social media platforms, and the analytics that go with them. Having these skills under your belt will make you agile if your job becomes unstable or vanishes out from under you.

Also, it’s essential to know how to brand and market yourself, and your strengths, to your own target market. Journalists often assume that their audience is the same as the audience of the outlet they work for; when their personal audience is the community that will provide their next job or professional opportunity.

And how different would that advice be to colleagues you generally train in developing countries? What advice would you give them?
I give the same advice to journalists working in developing countries. Again, the challenges are pretty much the same. I might advise them to use a different types of software, or a different platform, based on cost and access, but the skillsets that go with those production tools remain the same.

What, do you believe, are the ‘must have’ skills for today’s emerging industry leaders?
Emerging industry leaders need many skills. Two of the most important, in my view, are an ability to recognise and acknowledge areas where you lack knowledge, and a willingness to listen and take advice from experts – internal or external at your organisation – who can help you remain agile in a rapidly changing environment. Having this skill, and this approach, will help you put in place the associated internal processes to capture and share knowledge across your organisation, which will keep it responsive to business threats and opportunities as they emerge.

CONTACT CORINNE
You can email her at corinne.podger@digitalskillsagency.com or connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corinnepodger/

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