News Editor in an empty newsroom

NEWSROOM: The home of our newsdays every Friday.

In my week as News Editor, I sent around a newslist and gave detailed feedback (shown in blue below) on all article ideas I received in advance of the newsday .

This included suggestions of strong photos or interviews to gather in preparation for the newsday. Unfortunately, only one person attended the news conference and only a handful attended the newsday. This meant I couldn't see if my feedback was useful or implemented. There also weren't many articles to subedit or categorise on the site.

Instead, I used the newsday to launch our social media platforms. Below is a collage of the full launch across Instagram and X (Twitter), which involved creating profiles, banners, usernames, bio details, linking to our site, and tagging our location.

As a new profile, I think the most valuable posts were the ones which engaged with other accounts. For example, I re-tweeted the launch announcement on Truthfal's account to redirect the existing audience to our page. On the Instagram post of our website, I tagged the organisations that featured in those stories, such as Surfers Against Sewage and Tate St Ives, who subsequently liked the post. This created the potential for these organisations to reshare our post and grow our audience and engagement.

The most reliable way to grow an audience on social media is to post consistently. The ideal scenario would have been for us to post every Friday as part of our newsday, and perhaps in between newsdays to show the behind-the-scenes of reporting.

I shared the account details with the rest of the class so that we could collectively build a brand image. This also included the colour palette and logo, so that everyone's posts could be cohesive with our house style.

Unfortunately, there were no posts routinely uploaded on newsdays. Instead, there were an influx of posts from everyone else between 17th - 19th December just before the final portfolio deadline.

In her paper 'Journalism in the Age of Social Media' for the Reuters Institute, Jennifer Alejandro argues that modern journalists 'must also set aside time to check the replies or comments, and continue the thread of discussion'. I see this as the biggest missed opportunity with The Mouth social media platforms. By not posting weekly, we didn't allow time to interact with our audience and enhance our stories. We could have conducted opinion polls or included readers' comments in follow-up articles, to create a sense of dialogue and connection.

We could have also used the insights from our posts to see which articles were gaining the most interest each week and discussed these in our news conferences to help improve our proposed content the following newsday.