Building Journalists as Brands: Lessons from the Digital News Academy.
Thursday 14 August 2025 | 12:00
With a vast range of speakers on day 2 of the event on July 31st, I along with my other colleagues were invited to imbibe the skills and expertise of publishing effective online and print content.
Promote the profile of each journalist as a 'brand' and gain reader loyalty towards each reporter based on specific subjects of interest to help their media company grow.
The Digital News Academy (DNA) annual conference at the Google Head quarters in Sydney, Australia on August 1 spoke along these lines.
The DNA which is facilitated under the Melbourne Business School provided an opportunity to print journalists from the Pacific Islands (six from Papua New Guinea and three from Fiji) to grasp this ideology of promoting their work rather than relying on the company brand.
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Being a News/Sports journalist, I attended this training to help this masthead into the new digital transformation era and understanding online viewership demands.
With a vast range of speakers on day 2 of the event on July 31st, I along with my other colleagues were invited to imbibe the skills and expertise of publishing effective online and print content.
News Corp Australia had various of its journalists converse with us on the best practices of enhancing online viewership to make reasonable profits.
Content Director News at New Corp Australia, Lillian Saleh, shared how journalist could entice new readers into their digital platform via quality online stories and presentation.
For any story to thrive, there should be niche audience ready to imbibe this information and each journalist promote their work via their own brands.
From my journalistic viewpoint, I never thought in this direction of promoting my brand via my stories to help grow my company's overall brand.
The verity is used as an analysis platform to track stories which is making impact and helps the newsroom make informed decisions.
The most breathtaking learning was the: Artificial intelligence (AI) apps such as video editing apps like splice, Luma and to improve research time and accuracy, apps such as Google Gemini and NotebookLM.
DNA google trainer, Miguel D'Souza, highlighted the need for journalists to be equipped with AI tools.
Mr D'Souza said while human input is vital in fact checking information, AI tools such as Google Gemini, helps to research the background information in quick time.
At News Corp, there were multiple roles for specific journalists to report on specific topics such as entertainment, education, court, sports, hard news etc.
Specialising in one field and making it a passion is what drives the journalism landscape in Australia, which could be trailed in Fiji.
The Daily Telegraph editor, Jonathon Moran, reiterated that each journalist specialised in their various areas could become experts in their field.
Mr Moran said becoming experts and passionate about their specific field helps the entire company grow with audiences tagged into specific subjects.
This differs in Pacific Countries where journalists are all-rounders and engage in all areas of journalism.
There are benefits and drawbacks to specialising in one subject, however, for digital content attention, specialist subjects remain key.
The level of sophisticated journalism condensed into specific subjects helps people with specific interest areas to directly view content of their interest.
Revenue generation is of interest for any media outlet to survive financially in this fast competitive media landscape.
A specific field of interest which could potentially generate revenue on online platform is: sports reporting.
Sports is an area which engages a huge traction and to publish articles of exclusive and interesting nature could be sold at a subscription to sports enthusiasts.
A special thanks is rendered to the Australian Government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) who sponsored the trip of Pacific journalists to this much needed Australian trip.
