Let's be reporters...

The stories are in there. Somewhere.

Last month we delivered a course designed to help a major organisation story-find. Because before you can tell stories, you have to find them, right?

So we did a crash-course in enabling comms folk - and a few others - to be reporters.

The benefits are clear. Entrepreneurial, curious, output-focused, multimedia, contact-forging, fact-based, people-people, fast, insight-hungry… imagine if you could deploy the skills of the reporter in your business to uncover and develop the best of your organisation?

In short, how can you use journalism as an internal skill-set – using reporting techniques and the rigour of the newsroom to fully develop and deploy your company’s content?

The course went really well. And it was great fun, too. Which seem to be key criteria for actually making change. Do you think your company would be better placed to tell its stories, if you equip your people with the skills to source, refine, and deliver the stories that make strategy and purpose mean something real for your stakeholders? 

We pitched the course because we know that some companies are excellent at providing compelling, detailed, and persuasive stories that serve as examples of their purpose, value and strategy. Others, frankly, struggle. There is a disconnect between what they say they believe in, or want to do, or are transforming into, and the proof of it actually happening. 

That doesn’t mean it’s not. It means that the lines of communication are not running smoothly between the places and people where things happen, back to the corporate centre where information is gathered. In companies like this, what we heard more than a few times is, ‘We know the examples, use cases, human stories are out there – we just don’t know where they are. Or who has them.’

We can construct a tailored two/three hour workshop where everyone gets the chance to understand how global newsrooms process, challenge, commission, edit, and channel stories – and how everyone in the comms team (and beyond) can be an ‘internal journalist’. Journalism, and teaching it, runs deep in our DNA.

We'd love to hear from you if you think your business could use a few (tame) journalists.

Matt Guarente 

matt@guarenteco.com