Writing for digital media can be really tricky keeping in mind the target audience that is available on the platform and how the phenomenon of content writing has changed over the past few decades. These factors are extremely complicated and intricately connected together, hence explaining them can be quite mind boggling. But we had the golden opportunity to attend Atif Tauqeer’s lecture regarding writing for digital media. Atif Tauqeer is a well-known name in journalistic circles. Apart from being a journalist, he also happens to be a poet, writer and a vlogger. Currently working in DW in Germany, he touched base on many factors. First and foremost, he talked about the basic structure of news telling. The news must be conveyed in such a way that the viewer or listener can understand it clearly. The 5Ws play a huge role in that. Who, what, when, where and why. This factor remains valid for all news platforms including digital media. However, when we specifically talk about Digital platforms, they appear to different from the mainstream media. Due to the increasing use of smartphones, the speed of news feed has increased multiple times. That is the amount of news and the number of times it appears on someone’s timeline has increased. This way the role of the editor has been diminished in digital media. As a result of which, fake news is so easily propagated. News items are sensationalized and used as a tool for propaganda. In order to keep up with the rapidness of social media platforms and gain more readership, click based journalism was introduced which has further encouraged sensationalized news items and fake news culture.
It is because of these factors that journalism is now called “literature in hurry”. After explaining the phenomenon of digital media, Atif Tauqeer went on to explain how we could write credible yet catchy news items for digital media. The news must be conveyed in a compact and precise manner. No one has the time to read articles dragging on for pages. Hence, the shorter the article, the better the readership. Precise articles are more likely to be circulated. Moving on, the articles must have imagery or any other graphical element in them. This helps the language paint a vivid picture. Talking about language, he also mentioned that it should be “crisp” I.e. catchy, striking and impactful phrases and imagery. The content written must at least satisfy one section of the community. It might be in favor of it or against. Not to forget, that it should be understandable and relatable for the target audience.
All these factors if put together and practically implemented can provide you with content that is worthy of being published and read on digital media platforms.
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