domenica 16 ottobre 2016

How to be a blogger: meeting Chris Wheal



"These aren't the droids you're looking for"

With this brilliant quotation from Star Wars Chris Wheal, freelance journalist, editor, and consultant, gained our attention during the first lecture on Online publishing platform held last Tuesday at the London School of Journalism (LSJ).

First of all he asked us to search for each other on the internet using search engines as google or bing, in order to discover if we are easily findable on the web or not. Pragmatic from the beginning!

He showed us how easy it's to find him on websites simply writing his name and surname, and then he started listing the most known social media, such as



·         Facebook
·         Google+
·         MySpace
·         Tumblr
·         Twitter
·         Blogger
·         Snapchat
·         Youtube
·         Wordpress
·         What’s App
·         Pinterest
·         LinkedIn
·         Instagram
·         Periscope
·         Flickr
·         Audioboom
·         Viber
·         Vimeo
·         Vine
·         Swarm
·         Storify
·         Medium
·         Fousquare
·         Soundcloud



Therefore he explained to us what are the differences in online journalism and what we should take into account when we are writing a blog post or an article online. He also showed how easily is posting something  on the internet: he recorded a short video of the lesson posting it on Youtube.

He said that management and staff, students and lecturers, adults and children, all of them surf the internet, not only our target audience! Moreover users don’t like to scroll or maybe they are brought to the site without seeking it. The best thing to do is let them know exactly what they will find out from the page since the very first paragraph, or even communicate the aim of the post within 10 seconds.

Therefore he suggested to use impressionable headlines, short sentences, paragraphs between two and four lines, an objective language instead of emotive phrases, ‘you’ and ‘we’ rather than the third person. All of these tips hoping that web users will keep reading our article!

A good mixture of links, images, key words, tags and bullet points, and the game is done! We must always check if we have observed all the main rules when we finish an article, and then we are ready to post it!

As his last advise, Chris suggested to use search engines such as


in order to do our research and he invited us to have a look at the BBC Online website if sometimes we forget the typical British web newspapers style and structure…you never know if there’s a student with a memory like a sieve!

At the end of the lesson, we had an assignment that consisted in writing down the platforms we are signed up, our usernames, the percentage of our profile we have completed for that platform and if we make posts often, sometimes, rarely or never. Easy!

But soon Chris added also two other assignments with which we should demonstrate we have paid attention during the lesson: one article must have news/factual style (you can read it on my personal Wordpress site) and the other one must have the typical chatty style of the blog (my Blogger blog url is silviascicchitano.blogspot.co.uk). Quite challenging!

He claimed to be one of the most b*****d professor to put marks…but we are brave! So…