Yesterday the #Interhacktives went to the November meet-up of Hacks Hackers.
We heard a number of fascinating and inspiring speakers and here are the five things we took away from the evening!
1. News reporting is changing: from traditional ‘patches’ to ‘issues’
The Buzzfeed UK editor in chief Janine Gibson explained how Buzzfeed approached news by treating stories as issues rather than patches.
Normal newspapers beats are split up into how the government splits in departments.
However Buzzfeed, she said, took a broader ‘issues’ based approach: ‘the biggest stories cross beats.’
“We’ve spent a lot of time earnestly thinking about doing something not everybody else does” @janinegibson #hhldn pic.twitter.com/ASPhPyM6lm
— Peter Yeung (@ptr_yeung) November 30, 2015
2. Social media reporting is still an evolving art and experimentation is a good thing!
Mukul Devichand founder and editor of BBC trending told the audience how social media brings the journalist closer to their audience – it’s more ‘peer to peer’ ‘
‘We’ve done things where we were practically naked.’
In contrast Devichand said old-style journalists don’t understand this.
So when you’re tweeting, spreading memes and reporting on social media trends remember – experiment lots – there is no definite style and the rules and expectations change depending on the storyteller
3. News orgs see potential in Snapchat for revenue and innovative storytelling.
Blathnaid Healy, UK editor of Mashable said she thought Snapchat worked very well covering live events like the world cup, press conferences or interviews with celebrities.
#HHIdn @mashable started trying doing interviews with celebrities – debut on @snapchat then we put more content onto our website
— Elise Johnson (@eliserwjohnson1) November 30, 2015
4. Millenial journalists have no idea how phones work…
At Buzzfeed, Gibson revealed, the younger journalists react with stupefaction when the office phone rings. She says she has to teach them how to use it… 
To be honest, we have no idea what this is either.Â
5. Finally, as much as Buzzfeed talks about serious news journalism, you still can’t escape pictures of cats…
No Buzzfeed talk is complete without a cute animal graphic. @janinegibson @BuzzFeedUK #hhldn pic.twitter.com/ttZBCucLXi — Esmeralda Sandoval (@esmeralda_s27) November 30, 2015
David is a student of Interactive Journalism at City University. He has written for History Today, Lapidomedia and STV, contact him @djknowles22