On our first full day in New York, we had the opportunity to on a tour of the Financial Times. This was something I was looking forward to because I love being able to see how newsrooms operate. The first thing that struck me when I arrived was that the print copies of the paper were a shade of pink!
I was not super familiar with the Financial Times before visiting the newsroom, but I definitely learned a lot on the tour. We met different members of the staff including editors, reporters, video producers, social media specialists, podcast/audio producers and more. It was cool to see how the newsroom was comprised of people with such varying skills.
This really emphasized to me how many people it takes to have a successful newsroom. It is so important in the constantly changing media landscape that we live in to have people with a variety of skills that are able to innovate and adapt to create the best content using the most effective mediums. I also think the tour of the Financial Times helped me to see the necessity of having multiple skills–not just being able to write but being able to take decent photos or make enticing graphics.
The Financial Times is an international publication which means they are constantly receiving information from all over the globe so they really have to sift through the information to decide what is newsworthy. This showed me how important judgement is when it comes to working in the newsroom because they only have so many employees and they cannot write about every story that comes their way.
Another interesting part of the tour was going into the video production room at the Financial Times. I enjoyed learning about how they shoot videos covering financial/business topics and make them engaging.
Overall, I think something that was emphasized on the tour was how many people who work at the Financial Times will start working on a project that they think has potential and eventually, if they prove themselves, they get support from the company. This was what happened with the video and podcasting departments.
I think that this process applies to college newsrooms as well. As student journalists, we have the opportunity to experiment and we also happen to be pretty tech-savvy, so I think that now is the time for us to be trying new things and learning how to engage more with our audience. The tour of the Financial Times was really informative and inspired me to think about what we can do at The Beacon to really grow and evolve!
– Maddie Pfeifer
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