The Future of Journalism — Insights from Andrew Butler (The Sun’s Dream Team)
Andrew Butler is a NCTJ accredited journalist, broadcaster and editor with experience in online, print and radio formats. He works as a Digital Journalist for The Sun’s Dream Team, and has previously worked as broadcast assistant, producer, reporter and commentator at the BBC. He has also worked as a media assistant at Leyton Orient and Nottingham Forest.
Butler gave an interesting talk to our Journalism students about the work he does, how he uses social media to distribute content and, most importantly, how the students can make themselves more employable in the rapidly changing journalism industry.
On the Dream Team website, with around 1 million Fantasy Football players, Butler and his colleagues also produce other content: satire columns, for example, a relatively untouched area in football that now has a fond readership.
Other than that, the DreamTeam is very social media savvy — their Facebook Live Streams garner thousands of views, and their funny videos in the style of The LADBible or BuzzFeed accumulate a great number of shares and Likes. From the popular Salt Bae meme to a Live Stream in search of David Luiz, they cover just about everything a regular Facebook user wants to see on their feed.
Evidently an expert in his field, Butler gave plenty of good advice for students to take away — and here are his most important points:
1) Say yes more
If you are presented with an opportunity — take it! As a journalist, you have to be willing to constantly learn and adapt your writing style, even if the job you are working is not always going to be only fun and games.
2) Back your instincts even if it is a niche topic or story
Sometimes during his career, Butler followed his instincts rather than what his editor thought — and landed a huge success, for example when he insisted on interviewing the worst player on FIFA in 2017 and ended up gathering a big audience.
3) Make yourself invaluable
One of the most important skills to have as a modern journalist, according to Butler, are video editing skills. You need to know how to cut a video in an engaging way, or create the very popular subtitle videos for Facebook. Another essential skill to have is an understanding of how HTML works. This doesn’t mean that you need to possess an intricate knowledge of coding, but it’s useful to know how to perform simple tasks, such as embedding content.
4) Writing is not dead, but it will change
The way we write and how we consume writing is inevitably going to change. As Butler says, “Video will be king — if it isn’t already”. Facebook even estimates that their user’s feeds will be entirely made up of videos in 5 years time. Journalists need to adapt to this change, and simultaneously prepare for the next one: news consumption via voice interaction units. These units, such as Amazon’s Alexa, will introduce new ways of storytelling and ‘reading’ news, for example through a personalised morning briefing on the most important news.
Hopefully, his advice can help students and staff alike to think about how they can adapt to the new challenges journalism faces as social media platforms become increasingly personalised and change the way people consume news on a daily basis.
By Pia Ewers (Level 5 student @ University of Portsmouth)
