Interview

I'm going to do an interview to Julio Franco, an editor from www.telefoneate.com .

Can you give us a short introduction about your studies and how you started here?

I studied a Bachelor's Arts degree in Journalism back in 2009 at the Faculty of Media Studies at Complutense University of Madrid and in fact I'm currently attending its last year.

And I started working at Telefoneate.com one day I was searching for a job in the Internet. They hired me in September of the last year and I’m currently working there as a freelance editor.

How many posts do you write per week?

As a freelance editor I can write a post anytime I want. I may write three post one after another or I may write one a month. However, I started writing a post a day from Monday to Friday, which makes five posts a week and more or less twenty or twenty five a month, and that was from September to February. Right now I’m looking for a better job, so I have little time to write. Because of that I hardly post anything nowadays, though I’m still working on it.

Can you tell us your writting techniques and the style you use?

I hardly can speak about writing techniques aside from the standard journalist style. Being myself the only person who actually studied Journalism in the site, I’m the best writer they have and my posts are the only ones made in a professional way, and that’s with the standard issue: corroborating sources for a truthful information, using an inverted pyramidal structure that goes from the most important or specific things to talk about to the least or more general ones, a subject-predicate-complement structure to make simple sentences, condensing all the important information in the least number of characters, etc… Also, the good use of hyperlinks and SEO tools among others is crucial to make the post visible not only on the website but for the internet browsers too.

Finally, does this job help you as a job experience?

Being honest with you, yes, it is. Working for this site lets me to practice everything I know about how to make news and stuff so I don’t get rusty. However, I feel like this is not a place I should be because it’s neither a real job nor a webpage that pays me well for a professional service like mine. It’s indeed a good curriculum filler but what I need is to work in a real press agency or a bigger site, that’s why, like I told you before, I hardly post nowadays, because I’m looking for a better place to work. However, if someone wants to start with something related to the world of new technologies or with something easy related to making news I’d suggest to begin in a place like this at least to practice and acquiring some experience while searching for a better place to be working on.

Video: Assertive-Passive-Aggresive

Here in this link you have a video I made with some students for an activity and it's about three situations: Two aggresive people talking about football, an aggresive and passive people talking about a late report and the last one, two assertive people, one asking about dating with the ex-boyfriend of her friend.

Assertiveness

It's important to state your own opinion when a discussion is taking place, but also be really carefull when stating it. You must be assertive to avoid misuderstanding or problems.

1. First, make eye contact with the other speaker and use a calm tone of voice; be polite (ask him how he is) and relaxed because there is no need to be nervous.
2. Use a formal languaje and a coloquial style. This means there is a respect and close connection to the speaker resulting in a very calm and quiet situation.
3. Never think his opinion is wrong because that may lead into problems, such as misurderstandings, aggresive and awkward situations.
4. On the other hand, if he's wrong with a fact then you should say it and why, using as many arguments as possible. But using several arguments doesn't mean you have to speak a lot. Try to concrentrate as many as possible.
5. Finally, say goodbye to the speaker politely and reflecting a very good mood.

Being assertive is very important because it will barely give you any kind of problems.

Gestures, a vital piece of communication

In this class the secretary didn't prepare the class, so we moved quickly. This day the teacher talked about communication, that not always is the direct language the most important one when it comes talking about anything.

Just like last week, we watched another video, this time of a person giving a speech on a wedding twice. The first time he never made a gesture and was reading the paper's speech all the time. The second time, he was moving from right to left, making pauses, smiling, making a joke, pointing at the married couple... This was an example about how you should make a speech and how not to. In my opinion, is a big difference between the two of them and I realized that is very important to know how to talk in public.

Later, the teacher sent us an activity in pairs. First, we choose a quote from a pdf and tell it to our partner. Then I have to write about how he spoke, like gestures, eye-contact, etc; then we do the opposite thing. Later, we tell a childhood memory and do the same thing with the quotes.

This activity took me 20 minutes to do so.

I'll leave a video so you can see how important is the communication when it comes to give an emotional speech.