Jay Rosen proposes the idea that juvenile journalists should start by creating a niche platform for their work. This allows them to “know everything about something”. He recommends this because it requires research, teaches you the basics about online journalism and gives your targeted audience the upper hand, which allows you make mistakes and gives you the opportunity to handle these mistakes in a professional and timely way.
This technique allows new writers a platform on which they can gain visibility while also allowing them to learn the basics of online journalism. But Rosen makes a good point, in that interviews aren’t enough to gain visibility and become a “successful” journalist. Anyone can conduct a successful interview, but it takes a special type of journalist to appeal to a niche audience who almost always knows more than the writer. But writing to this niche audience allows one to hone in on their research skills and correct their mistakes and misinformation in a professional and timely manner.
This ideology that one should know “everything about something” applies to our group project because that is essentially what is being asked of us. Pick any topic of your choosing, research it, become one with it and make a platform for it. Sure, we could interview several people asking about their favorite colors and if Arcadia’s school colors had any influence on their decision to become a Knight, but that isn’t very interesting.
Instead, by discovering more about the history and psychology of colors, with a focus on Blue since it is the Pantone Color of the Year, and tying this all back to school colors, it provides a well rounded, interesting podcast about something everyone has had some interest in at some point in their life. Yes, including interviews is essential to our topic because we would like to know the student perspective on school colors, but it isn’t the focus of our podcast or our research.
Researching in such a way allows us to make connections between psychology and history that we may have not had access to if we had just conducted several interviews. These connections provide us with more interesting things to talk about in our episode and our blog posts. While it is possible to get similar information from an interview that could also be found in research, interviews have a bigger risk of providing false information, depending on who is being interviewed. In our case, we would be interviewing students, not experts, so the risk of misinformation is quite high.
Overall, the main reason for starting your niche platform is simply because you can. Yes, it will teach you important aspects and techniques of journalism, but it will also teach you how to be a good researcher. You don’t need to be a scholar to be proficient in research based writing, its a skill that every good writer should have. While interviews and outside opinions are essential to an informative, well researched piece, they should not be carrying the weight of it. A good interviewer, has done the research for themselves so they are able to ask interesting questions beyond the surface level of their topic.
Rikki Rosenthal 