A caller recently asked me what’s the difference between Journalism and Content Creation. The answer is in a recent lecture I delivered on bridging the gap between journalism and content creation.
Below is an excerpt from the lecture and some additional thoughts.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, journalism is “… the collection, preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials through such media as pamphlets, newsletters, newspapers, magazines, radio, motion pictures, television, books, blogs, webcasts, podcasts, and e-mail.” This definition should be updated to include social media.
The role of the media, which journalism is part of is to inform, educate and entertain.
Content creation, by a definition, is said to be the process of identifying a topic you want to write ( or share information) about, deciding which form you want the content to take, formalising your strategy (keyword or otherwise), and then actually producing it for the platform of your choice.
Wikipedia states that Content creation is producing and sharing information or media content for specific target audience.
Like in journalism, it can be text, photo, audio, video or any other format or combined. Skirt is a form of content.
There are clear similarities between the two. They both involve information dissemination. The goal is to educate, inform and entertain. The News, Features, Interviews, Programmes written and produced by journalist are also content when used on online platforms.
While journalists are trained and certified media professionals, content creators don’t have to be, though there are now training and certification for content media roles. While a journalist can easily expand his or her work to include content creation, a content creator cannot easily play the role of journalist.
Anyone can be a content creator, but not anyone can be a journalist. Journalism is a profession. There are laws and code of ethics guiding the practice of journalism.
What binds the us together is the content we have to offer our audiences who don’t know this distinction but have insatiable thirst for information, knowledge, ideas and more from any platform that can offer them.
The above reason is why journalists can no longer limit themselves to offering traditional editorial content in the formats they are used to if they still want to be reckoned with as a source of information that is more than just breaking news. People want information they can use for various aspects of their lives and expect media organisations and their journalists to include them in their offerings as some local and international platforms do.
Content creators don’t mind taking over the professional roles of journalists using editorial content we provide, journalists are the ones who need to assert their position as the more reliable sources of information by being more digitally compliant.
