Social Journalism courses

All our Digital Journalism courses are designed to help you develop a practical social media strategy to help you use and maximise social media tools for newsgathering as well as building community around your news or personal brand.


Course content includes: developing your strategy, how to find pictures and videos from breaking news events, how to discover original stories and identify the best case studies and sources for your reporting. They will also result in you building stronger communities around your journalism, creating greater audience loyalty and providing the opportunity to identify and reach out to new audiences.


Crucially the training is designed around building these tools into your daily workflow. Our experience has taught us what works and what doesn’t. Poor training is a waste of everyone’s time, and these sessions are designed to result in changed behaviour back in the newsroom.


These courses have been created and developed by Ultra Social, highly experienced former BBC news journalists together with a former academic from Cardiff University’s School of Journalism. They are based on the experience of the Ultra Social facilitators designing and delivering similar training to well over 2,000 BBC journalists via the BBC College of Journalism.

Bespoke courses can be designed to suit individual broadcasting requirements along with personalised ‘Reputation management coaching for presenters and broadcasters’ to help build your personal brand and avoid being in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Examples of courses:

Ultra Social Newsgathering:  Using social media in the newsroom

  • Using digital tools to search the web and undertake in-depth research
  • Top tips for effective search, keywords, advanced search techniques
  • Finding stories and original angles, case studies and contributors
  • Moving off diary and ahead of the news
  • Monitoring trends, realtime search and keeping across breaking news
  • Sourcing rich content: pictures, video and UGC
  • Aggregating, filtering and managing information on a daily basis
  • Netiquette and best practice for seeking information
  • Ethics, copyright, legal considerations

Ultra Social Strategy:  How to design and implement a successful social media strategy and drive change in the newsroom

  • Identifying key aims and specific objectives
  • Creating a manageable social media policy and guidelines
  • Developing a clear and measurable social media strategy
  • The individual journalist, programme or paper as an online brand
  • Metrics and measurement – how to evaluate success
  • Balancing transparency and openness with privacy and ethics
  • Crisis management, what to avoid and how to cope if things go wrong

Ultra Social Content and Curation:  How to use social media to create, curate and share content

  • Designing a content plan, researching audience and competition
  • Sourcing content, tapping in to news hooks
  • Making content out of process, social bookmarking and sharing
  • Crowdsourcing, inviting the audience to share ideas and knowledge
  • Using social networks to engaging the audience and share UGC
  • Curating and storytelling using tools such as Storify and Storyful
  • Sharing content using microblogging tools: Twitter, Posterous, Tumblr
  • Creating and sharing effective audio, pictures and video
  • Using livestreaming technology
  • Making your news clickable and shareable

Ultra Social Engagement:  Engaging and connecting with the audience

  • Identifying your digital identity, tone of voice and online persona/brand
  • Proactive vs reactive engagement
  • Engaging key influencers, bloggers and opinion formers
  • Building and managing community using social networks, forums, wikis
  • Community engagement models and building trust
  • Moving from broadcasting monologue to interactive dialogue
  • Ultra Social Mobile The future of news is mobile
  • Getting the most from your smartphone
  • Setting up and using the key apps eg. LuciLive, Skype etc
  • Tips and tricks for the mobile journalist
  • Live broadcasting, streaming and tweeting
  • Geolocation, using location-based apps
  • Recording and editing interviews and packages
  • Shooting good pictures and video