I have spent the last 2 weeks at MSN, where I have been lucky enough to be given the freedom to be involved in research projects, interviews, writing articles and the Jubilee news days. I think two weeks at MSN have given me invaluable experience about the industry and have also helped me to be a better Journalist.
MSN is a smaller news organisation than that of the BBC or ITV for example, therefore hires fewer journlaists but has a massive audience. I was based mainly on the sports team where there are only 3 journalists, therefore the organisation relise on deals with other organisations such as ESPN, or press releases. However there are articles written by journalists at MSN which I was also a part of. MSN's focus is on what people are talking about, what is interesting to the audience and what the current conversation is around the world; therefore there is a huge push towards twitter and what is being discussed on social networks. Everytime a story breaks the journalists at MSN are looking at how an article can be created to represent what people are saying about that story in particular. I feel this is one of the ways that MSN gains such a large audience, as it cannot compete in terms of journalists, fresh and exclusive news and therefore by engaging the audience with current events and conversation, the audience figures are higher than they otherwsie would be.
Another focus of MSN is on pictures and videos which are created by either the journalists themselves or taken from places such as the Press Assossiation, this makes creating a feature or an article much easier than it would be if I was doing the same feature or article for WINOL as I would have to get the images myself by taking a photo of the subject, whereas a company like MSN, who works with PA or other sites that supply images and videos, can easily get a picture related to the subject of the article and upload it instantly saving time.
The focus on images and galleries for features, provide the audience with greater entertainment than looking at pages and pages of words, pictures are more visually pleasing and therefore help to gain a bigger audience. MSN often create galleries of recent events such as the Jubilee and recent news recaps, or a way of visuallising statistics with images and captions rather than large amounts of text.
On my second week at MSN I was involved in the Jubilee news days, over the 4 days of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee which I found so enjoyable. It wasnt to dissimilar to our own news days on the Novermber 30th strikes and the general elections. Each person was given a role before, during and after the events with different footage collected, live streaming of events, pictures and articles written, with twitter updates and trending blogs.It was very interesting to see that WINOL's news days were very similar to MSN's in the way they were set out and organised, however there was much more preperation for the MSN version with a lot more content produced.
During my time at MSN I created seceral different articles, features and galleries for both news and sport which I think has helped me understand how the bussiness works. For example I know how to use certain systems used by the company to add articles and pictures on the website and publish them. Despite their being hundreds of different systems that are used by different companies, knowing how to use some of them gives me a good start when starting a job after my degree. I am also now aware of time constraints, the importance of getting facts, statistics, spelling and grammar correct straight away and generally how a newsroom works. I was also lucky enough to be able to sit in an interivew with Andrew Flintoff, and also interview former Olympic Athlete Steve Backley.
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