Alright, and we’re back for another blog post! What’s this week’s topic you might ask? Well, this week Ebony-Renee Baker, a fashion editor for Refinery 29, shared her experience as a journalist throughout the years, and gave us some highlights on her career, and gave some tips that helped her along the way!
As someone who is currently pursuing journalism, there is one thing that she touched upon that I would like to further explore. Baker mentioned that for any content that you decide to create, you always want to be associated with the work that you produce.
As a current journalist, here is how I would apply this point through my own works: 
- Transparency→ The audience can know who is responsible for the information they consume through attribution. As a result of this transparency, readers can assess my credibility and expertise based on my previous work and reputation.
- Trust and Credibility→ Journalism is built on trust. When I constantly link my name with high-quality news, I earn my audience’s confidence. This trust is critical to the long-term success of individual journalists as well as media institutions.
- Professionalism→ In journalism, associating my name with my work implies professionalism and ethical behavior. It demonstrates that I stand by my reporting, and I am prepared to be held accountable for my actions and decisions as a journalist.
- Building a Personal Brand→ Consistently associating my name with outstanding journalism will assist me in developing a personal brand as a trustworthy and dependable journalist. This brand has the potential to lead to new possibilities, a devoted following, and professional progression.
- Engagement and Feedback→ By affixing my name to my work, I urge my audience to interact with it. When readers, viewers, or listeners know who the journalist is, they are more inclined to offer criticism, ask questions, or seek explanation. This interaction can result in more accurate reporting and a greater relationship with my audience.
- Networking→ the more people I know, the better. Having to work with different kinds of people, in different fields of work, who have different specialities, makes my own work more diverse, as well, will appeal to more of the public eye and my audience. Knowing a lot of people can help me land more jobs, even the ones I never thought I’d never do.
But you didn’t think that was it, did you? How are you supposed to write for an audience if you don’t know who your audience is? Well, that is why it is so important to know your audience’s demographic. This usually involves a market by elements such as age, education, income, family size, race, gender, occupation, and nationality. These elements are crucial to understand about your audience. You can’t produce good work, if you don’t know why you’re doing it to begin with, and who you are doing it for.
As a journalist who is constantly seeking new stories to write about, a big part of the job is talking to people. One of the news values include impact, and that is understanding how your specific audience is impacted by the topic of the story you are writing on. For example, if I was writing a story on university student costs, that is a very specific group of people I am writing for. But like any good journalist would do, I need to do research on this demographic of people who are in university and paying these costs.
This research would include: 
- conducting interviews with university students (also international students)
- Interview the school’s financial faculty
- look at osap and the grants and loans the Canadian government offers to students.
- As well, I would look at scholarship Canada.
All of these things are important to research if I am going to focus my story on university students’ as my demographic.
Well, that’s all for this week’s blog, and I will catch you in the next one!