Juanma Romero is the most awarded journalist of the last decade in Spain. He more than fifty national and international awards, in addition to eleven books. The latest Become visible that has just been released. Today we speak with him to tell us how he sees the world of journalism and what you have to do to be visible.
How do you see journalism today?
Journalism is changing, that is clear. But it is not changing any more than in previous times, when the radio appeared and it was thought that the press was going to disappear, just as when we suddenly found ourselves with television.
Now we have the internet and social networks and there is another way to inform. But news is still news, no matter how you look at it. And the manipulation of information is also the order of the day.
Some speak of citizen journalism, and affirm that all those who have a cell phone are journalists, but this is not true, at least from my point of view. The journalist is a journalist, the rest are people with technology that allows them to transmit images and sound, but nothing else.
• How can your book help a journalist?
Make yourself visible can help journalists, especially those who work in agencies or act as such, to get their information to become news. Many agencies send press releases every day and are not aware that journalists are not capable of opening all their emails, not because of a lack of interest on our part or because we believe we are superior, simply because we are not attracted to them, they are not attractive to us. . And we don’t have time for so much email.
Those agencies that are paid religiously by their clients every month have an obligation to attract us with every email they send us. Some agencies have realized this lack of punch, because they don’t see themselves as capable of reaching the journalist and seek outside help to find out how to get their clients to become news. Others do very well and do not need our help. And for many others, their pride and vanity prevent them from recognizing that they are on the wrong path, there is everything. And that prevents them from generating authority.
• Could it be that you get too much journalistic information?
The journalist receives a lot of information, more than he can manage. He thinks that if a professional receives five hundred emails every day and has to manage them all, reading one and answering it can take three minutes. If you multiply that by five hundred, you get something like fifteen hundred minutes; that is, 25 hours a day. It seems difficult if we take into account that the day only has 24 hours.
Conclusion, emails are not read, they are deleted at a rate of one per second and you have to get yours to interest me in a single second, hopefully in two seconds. That is what we teach in Make yourself visible, that your email interests the journalist.
And for those of us who receive the emails, there are many of us, the book serves as therapy to see ourselves reflected in the situation we experience every day. It’s like going to the psychiatrist, but without the couch.
• And to a future journalist, how can reading your book help him?
We show a future journalist all the mistakes that are made in the profession and I show them in first person because the first mistakes he finds are mine which, in forty years in the profession, as you can imagine, are many, and I don’t care. I shut them up
• After your long professional career, what advice would you give to journalism students?
Let them work, they don’t give anyone anything.
I’m probably not the smartest, nor the most intelligent, but there aren’t many workers who beat me.
I’ve made it my goal to make Yourself Visible the best-selling book on Amazon. I don’t know if I will succeed, but for this I have deployed a promotion and sales campaign that involves three months of work. Just to find the keywords for the search engine I have spent more than a hundred hours of work. And I haven’t finished the process yet.
If I’m successful, people will say it’s because I work on TVE, but that’s not true. If I am successful it will be because I have worked hard on it. And if I do not have it, it will be because I have not done it well, neither more nor less.
• What will the reader find in your book? What audience is it aimed at?
It is addressed to any person, company or institution that wants to become news. It would not hurt the political parties that are now facing two electoral campaigns to read the book, even though I am not talking about politics.
I tell the case of some companies that hire me to give training to their communication department because they are stagnant. Sometimes because they are people of a certain age who do not want to approach the digital world and other times because they are very young and do not think about the traditional market, the press of a lifetime.
Going out for coffee with a journalist sounds strange to young people, they only feel comfortable sending WhatsApp or emails. The truth is that you have to bet on both and combine them, because that mix generates greater benefits and we don’t know where the readers are who are going to become customers for the company.
Also, in the book there is a very special gift for all buyers, a QR code. In this code I explain the entire strategy that I have followed for the promotion and sale of Hazte visible, both in traditional and digital media as well as in social networks and other platforms, which here all add up.
It is hard and long work. As hard as the one I developed years ago when I managed to be interviewed by more than a thousand radio stations in just two years, one by one. At that time I achieved the record of twenty radio interviews in a single day. How did I get it? I explain that in Make yourself visible.