Thursday July 3rd, 7,00pm, upstairs in the St Aldates Tavern,
Opposite Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates
An open networking event for journalists and would-be journalists working online and/or in broadcasting and print, as reporters, feature writers, photo/video-journalists, editors, PRs, designers, bloggers, front-end developers and more.
This is the second in our new-style branch meetings which aim to be more informal and inclusive, and follows a very successful June meeting where we piloted the new format.
Tim Dawson, chair of the NUJ’s Freelance Industrial Council, who writes regularly for a range of national newspapers and magazines including the Sunday Times, New Statesman and Times Education Supplement, blogs at http://tim-dawson.com/ and is co-publisher ofhttp://newmodeljournalism.com/, will present a short overview of some of the innovative ways journalists are using the internet and digital media to find new ways of working, and new ways to promote themselves and earn a living from what they do.
Steven Mathieson, a freelance member of the Oxford NUJ branch who has spent many years on the Guardian, specialising in information technology in healthcare and government, will talk about his experiences using the internet to reach a wider audience, build his profile, gather information, advertise his book CardDeclined, and crowdfund his reporting on the Ends of Britain via the Beacon journalism platform. He will set out why he thinks raising money from subscriptions is a more workable model than advertising for sustaining quality journalism.
We will also have contributions from Sonja Francis the editor of Thame.net, who moved from a background in local newspapers to set up the web-based news service, as well as from members who started off on the web development side and are now looking to expand into creating content.
If you have experiences good or bad in using digital media to earn money from journalism – offering web-based services or using the internet to boost your profile, find new clients, network within your specialist area, gather information – please come to the meeting and share them. If you are looking for tips and advice on getting started, or maybe for opportunities to collaborate, then this is the place to be.
The meeting is open to all NUJ members, whatever media sector you work in.
If you are not a member but are interested in joining or learning more about the union and getting started in journalism, you can apply to attend the meeting by sending an email to oxfordnuj@gmail.com subject line ˂making journalism pay˃
Oxford NUJ 
I love the sound of this. Is there any way you could film it, so that people from other branches (I live in Bristol) could benefit?
Happy to put out a call to see if any of our members would be up for filming it, but it is more networking than a speaker meeting, so the results may not be very pretty. Why not try something similar in Bristol?
Thanks Steve for that succinct report of the meeting, with loads of helpful links. A great resource for Bristol and other branches who want to explore this topic further. We’d welcome comments from other members about their own experiences trying to earn a living in digital journalism