University Event with Lance Ulanoff, Hofstra Class of ’86

The speaker at my event was Lance Ulanoff, Lawrence Herbert School of Communication class of 1986. He’s a tech and social media commentator, acting as the current Editor-In-Chief at Lifewire now. 

One of the most interesting things I took away from Ulanoff’s speech was how he illustrated proper use of data in articles. As we know in the current state of journalism, many things are taken out of context so it’s important to use data properly and effectively. His exact quote about the way a site like FiveThirtyEight who focus heavily on data reporting is “It’s an incredibly useful way of delivering information.” 

He added that although data does the best job at informing people, that doesn’t mean that your narrative for a certain article has to be obsolete. In fact you should keep the words you used to construct your point, but use data to back up your points as “good points bare repeating.” 

He further conveyed great resources to make your own content from home, such as a site like kapwing.com to make your own “distracted boyfriend” meme or google charts and statista.com for making data charts. 

When talking about creating “thumbstoppers” or media within your article to make the person stop reading and start watching, Ulanoff goes through the process of putting photos together in something like Photoshop, but emphasized how attention grabbing videos are. His one area of caution was with GIF’s, and how if you use GIF’s you need to be careful of who exactly your audience is, because there’s a good chance if you’re using GIF’s you’re grabbing them from GIPHY. However, Ulanoff warns that this is a dangerous path to go down because “what you’ll end up noticing is GIF’s from GIPHY are used in lots of other places.” He then showed us how to make GIF’s with something like ScreenTool. 

He shows us how powerful thumbstoppers are for content. His quote “If you want real visceral content that people will react to, an image or other media will do it for you” and adds to his further credibility by saying “this is what I do day in and day out”