Starting from ZERO: Go niche.

After reading Jay Rosen’s article, I was able to reflect on Rosen’s advice to new journalists. He advises beginner journalists to become knowledgeable and reliable within a niche interest and to become an expert on a specified interest or topic. This way you can attract an audience of people who have very little other resources. This advice of narrowing your scope is easy to compare to the work my group and I have been doing on our podcast project called ‘Pigment of Your Imagination’. For this assignment, we, as a group of four, are tasked with creating and recording a podcast, so the question of ‘what’s something we all can talk about?’ came up extensively while planning our theme and topic. Without even knowing we followed Rosen’s advice, each of us dedicated ourselves to a specific topic that our podcast would cover and we would get deep into it. We placed ourselves into small niches of our overarching topic and assigned the task of becoming mini experts about each topic. With each of us knowing “everything” about our “something” it’s much easier to have an interesting, in depth and broad conversation about a topic, something an audience would enjoy consuming. Our topic being color seems broad, but each of our niches collectively bundle together to create a coherent and interesting subject of conversation that wouldn’t exist without our individual research.  We could simply just interview people about how they look and regard color in our world, but without a niche, the podcast we would make would end up being boring and directionless. By knowing everything about one facet of color’s role in our world, we offer up the chance for education, comparison and discussion between our group members which ultimately will attract an audience as it’s lively and specific enough to be considered a new thought. Presenting yourself as a beckon of knowledge about one specific thing makes you reliable, and an audience will more likely trust your content.