My advice for young reporters: “Be a doer — keep moving forward.”
I was invited to speak at Comm Week 2021 at California State University, Fullerton, and these are the notes I wrote for their bilingual students. I hope others also find them helpful.
Hi. It is great to be here.
I’d like to start by thanking Professor Jesus Ayala and California State, Fullerton for this invitation. I am honored to be part of this communication week.
I have been lucky to mentor a few of your bilingual students over the past few years. This experience has enriched my life in many ways. So, if any of you are in the audience, thank you for keeping my WhatsApp and email inbox busy.
Jorge Ramos once said, “I’m an immigrant and I’m a journalist, and those two things define me.”
I feel the same.
I’m originally from Venezuela, where I studied journalism and mass communication. I started working at a newspaper when I was 18 years old. I covered many beats: economy, tourism, art and culture, politics … and I loved every minute of it.
But, as a young reporter, I used to live in fear in Venezuela. I was censored, and the government constantly criticized me. Venezuelan journalists work under the continual threat of jail and lawsuits, and constantly feared for our personal safety.
At the same time, my husband worked for a mayor who opposed the Chavez regime, and he lived in constant fear as well. So we sold our car and our books and came to the U.S.
I was 26 years old when I got accepted into a master’s program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Getting a master’s degree helped me in many ways: I met new friends, got exposed to new ideas and I kind of improved my English. But I also gained knowledge in other areas that later opened many doors and improved my work as a journalist: I learned about graphic design. I learned programming and audio editing, but most importantly, I learned how to pitch and sell a story.
After graduating, I worked for two nonprofits doing mostly creative production: an international orchestra and a magazine in Chicago. I also worked at a press agency and did a lot of freelance work, mostly with filmmakers and musicians.
Social impact at Univision
In the past five years, I’ve been working at Univision. I believe it is the most rewarding job I’ve done yet and the one that has helped me find my mission. I lead the digital and social media strategies for social impact and corporate responsibility campaigns in areas such as access to health care, immigration, education, promoting diversity, technology, battling misinformation, and getting Latinos to vote and fill out their census forms.
In these past several years, I can’t even tell you how many Facebook Lives we have produced. 100 per year? Videos? Animated explainers? Vertical, horizontal, square graphics? 5,000? Maybe more.
I love my job because it has allowed me to serve the Latino community and constantly innovate at the same time.
We have created virtual stickers, Instagram lenses, infographics, audio pieces, animations, mini-documentaries, articles … You name the format; we have experimented with it.
I also get to work with sports, entertainment, network news and all the local stations, which has helped me understand our community better. Univision has over 120 combined television and radio stations, plus 89 affiliates, all of them with their own social media accounts. That’s an infinite universe of possibilities for synergy, learning and experimentation.
What has worked and what hasn’t in these past five years?
Thinking about the audience first works.
Reading the comments works.
You don’t need fancy tools to listen. Although, I’m a nerd, so I like to use all the fancy tools and toys that can help you find emerging topics, monitor events and find relevant stories more quickly. But sometimes, all you need to create content that generates engagement may be something more simple such as reading and responding to emails, Facebook messages and tweets from the audience and community members.
What doesn’t work? Planning too far ahead. Many of our biggest successes have come because we pivot constantly.
The old model of journalism used to be: Newsgathering — production — distribution.
But journalism is more effective when it integrates real-time feedback from audiences. There is no doubt that our community values participation much more than the “we talk, you listen” approach.
The future of journalism?
We are already living in the future.
We all live and work in a mobile-first environment, so everything has to be created for mobile consumption, then adapted to other, larger platforms.
Our audiences are fragmented.
Journalists are building products, learning about the business side, using artificial intelligence, bots, employing data storytelling and exploring new platforms on which to distribute content and grow new audiences.
There is TikTok, where a news channel in Spanish is watched by almost 2.4 million people every day (@ac2alityespanol). There are digital newspapers on Instagram (@es.decir Diario). *Original source: Mar Manrique.
Audio is big now.
There is podcasting. But there is also Clubhouse — which is already being considered the future of podcasting — and more recently, Twitter Spaces.
We need to be comfortable in those places.
Even Ikea has pivoted to audio. Last December, they announced that, after more than 70 years of printing their iconic catalog, they were putting an end to its paper version because of the change in their customers’ consumption patterns. Now the brand has opted for the podcast as a new distribution format.
Gaming is big. So, learning how to “gamify” news is something worth testing and researching.
Against all odds, we are living in a new era of long-form journalism. Articles consisting of more than 1,000 words give better results in terms of social media interactions, backlinks and engagement.
Some media companies are experimenting with courses on topics such as financial literacy.
So, the message here is that we need to find ways to keep growing, keep finding ways to reach new audiences and increase engagement.
But the present and the future of journalism are, of course, not only about formats.
Credibility and trust are still the most important things.
Service journalism should be a priority. Our audience wants and needs information that can help them make decisions about their communities and their families.
We have to value equity and inclusion. We have to elevate solutions and allow members of our community to use their voices.
We are here to serve our community, and I take that commitment very seriously. The reporters that I admire most are the ones who ask themselves every day, “What can I do to be more helpful? Where am I needed the most? How do we get at the truth? What should the public know?”
Democracy depends on facts and truth. As we have learned in this past year, facts and truth are matters of life and death. Misinformation and disinformation can kill. Knowledge and expertise can move our community forward.
In his Harvard commencement speech, civil rights pioneer John Lewis said this, “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.”
We, as journalists, have the same obligation.
On financing projects
We don’t know exactly how to make a lot of money with the new technologies. But as a journalist, it’s also our responsibility to learn how projects get funding and get involved in that process.
Learn about managing and promoting projects. Learn about spreadsheets, budgets, working with marketing and all the machinery of making media. Learn about subsidizing opportunities. Get in the habit of bookmarking grants for journalists. There are many organizations out there that can finance your documentary or your podcast, but you have to do the job, learn how to pitch, and follow the instructions and deadlines.
I have applied for many grants in the past and helped others apply for grants as well. It starts with a Google search: grants that fund multimedia projects on health issues, for example. And you take it from there.
Also, learn how to write a compelling pitch:
Keep your pitch short — one or two paragraphs, maximum. Please familiarize yourself with the media and editor that you are pitching to beforehand to understand their content, tone and scope. If you have particular expertise on this subject, share that. What makes you the best person for this story? If your story is based on a personal experience, you need to make sure to relate it to a broader set of experiences. Include a variety of perspectives. Find unexpected angles to topics that are on the news agenda. Share with whom you have spoken, or plan to speak, for the story.
Include clips of your work.
This could be an online portfolio or a demo reel. Whatever you do, it has to highlight your best work.
For a demo reel, in my opinion, 60–90 seconds is enough in most cases. Less is more. This doesn’t have to be a big project.
You can start practicing by sharing your work on social media and creating IG stories to promote your work. Include videos, pictures and captions. Remove as much music and other people’s voices as possible. This is all about you showing off your potential. If you want to be on camera, open with a shot of yourself. Test what gets the best response among your contacts. My friend Maria Alesia Sosa from Univision Miami is great at this. She always creates small promos for her on-air content that feel very fresh and authentic and help her engage with her audience in a more intimate way.
Gabriela Martinez, your fellow student and recently graduated bilingual multimedia journalist, is also great at social media storytelling.
When you feel ready, go ahead and edit the reel you are planning on sharing with editors; include your name and contact information on a quick slate at the start and end. It’s okay to have a couple of different reels to choose from that focus on different skill sets. I like to create one per project as a recap.
Some lessons learned.
Disappointment will come. Don’t lose faith. Persevere. Where you are right now is not who you’ll be. Embrace the mess.
Cultivate sources. Read and watch the news. Get up early and get informed.
Don’t obsess about finding what you love. The only way to find what you enjoy and are good at is by trying many, many things. Be a doer. Keep moving forward. We are all permanently in a beneficial state of flux and can try new ways of seeing ourselves and test new areas of passion. Ira Glass, from This American Life, said that he learned “pacing and flow and humor and emotional arcs” from high school musicals and as a teenage magician at children’s birthday parties. I, myself, studied more than 10 years of piano and classical music, and that taught me math and discipline. Keep testing exciting and weird things.
Networking is about being vulnerable. We are in the middle of a global pandemic and a worldwide economic recession. We are buried in debt and scared of unemployment. We are all, to some degree, burned out. Reach out to colleagues and be part of professional organizations. This takes work, but it is incredibly worth it. I’m very close to my local chapter of NAHJ, and the friendships that I’ve made have enriched my life in ways I can’t even count. Every time I feel overwhelmed, I reach out to them.
I also receive and support many newsletters: Sonia Weiser publishes Opportunities of the Week (oppsoftheweek.com) with opportunities for freelancers. I’m also subscribed to MEOjobs, a new newsletter by young reporter Mar Manrique in Spanish called Fleet Street, and many other industry newsletters.
Also, keep in touch with your classmates. For 20 years, I have been in close contact with many of my classmates. They are like family. They have also helped me find jobs in two different countries.
Networking is also about paying it forward, so I spend a fair amount of time every month helping young Latino journalists and journalists from underrepresented communities improve their portfolios and multimedia projects. I do it for free. You’ll find a link to my schedule on my website: olivialiendo.com.
If English is not your first language, don’t let your insecurities stop you from doing work you are passionate about. Read in English, watch TV with English captions, lean on colleagues and friends who can help you copy edit essential emails. Use Grammarly. Ask people to spell things out. Hire a professional editor for the most important texts that you want to publish on your own. It’s not as complicated or expensive as it sounds; I work with a great one on Upwork who has read many of my most personal texts in the past few years. If you email me at hello@olivialiendo.com, I can give you his direct contact information.
And finally, try to create the content you want to consume. Make the stuff you want to make. Don’t wait for the perfect job. Do it now.
