Strengthening Digital Marketing with Training on Journalism

As a private school, Al Azhar 55 Islamic Primary School should make efforts to maintain its reputation. For that matter, we keep organizing things to look attractive. The presence of an adequate digital marketing team to generate the activities through its official website and social media accounts to public is also indispensable. By then, the School will look lively and active.

To support this 'liveliness', a series of training on content creating and writing for the website and social media team is a must. Therefore the team would be kept updated with what is on in the world of digital marketing. Me, as part of the social media team and next year's coordinator for student admission, attended such a training on last Saturday, June 25, 2022. The training took place at Asram Foundation's meeting room from 09.00 a.m. to 03.00 p.m. Each school under the Asram Foundation sent a representative to attend the meeting.

The speakers were Bapak Heri Purwata and Bapak . They are senior journalists at two top news portals, i.e. republika.com and malioboronews.com.

Bapak started his presentation with the essentials of journalism and the differences between mainstream news media and news portals, and more detailed explanation about news portals based on his personal experience. He elaborated that the essentials of journalism consist of questioning with the WH-questions, the use of the upside down pyramid (news starts with the most important information and ends with the least one), and the criteria of news values, which include actuality, attractiveness, uniqueness, of human interest, and proximity.

When talking about news portals, he repeatedly mentioned that keywords play the key role for some news to be reached by readers. He insisted that there should be keywords scattered throughout the news. More importantly, the title and the first three paragraphs should contain more than the rest of the news. It is for the news to be easy to reach when readers google the keywords. Furthermore, he added that hashtags play a vital role too, for the same purpose.

Aside from that, in general, he stated that portal news give writers more freedom in terms of grammar rules that include the number of words in a paragraph, the placement of conjunctions which doesn't allign the principle of cohesion and coherence, and the choice of words which might involve different langauges to make the message is strongly delivered. Therefore, in general, it is more flexible than the mainstream news media.