Facttactic

Corporate and technical writers

Training and education

innovative online training for Māori journalists

Congrats to Aotearoa Media Collective for the release of their second online training resource for Māori journalists.

AMC last week released the Taumatua Programme, a series of four e-learning modules that explore the importance of building and strengthening relationships between the media and Māori.

The programme follows on from AMC’s Kōmiromiro Programme, a series of seven e-learning modules designed to strengthen Māori journalism, that was released last year.

Kōmiromiro includes training on interviewing techniques, court reporting, local government reporting, feature and opinion writing and much more, and has contributions from some of New Zealand’s most prominent Māori journalists.

You can find both programmes here: https://matamedia.co.nz/maori-journalism-training-resources/

Facttactic is proud to have played a small role in getting both ground-breaking programmes online and looks forward to working further with Aotearoa Media Collective to help further strengthen Māori journalism in Aotearoa.

how to easily move a WordPress website to a new web host

If you need to move your WordPress website to a new web host, there are plenty of plugins you can load into your site that will do the job for you. But my experience, having tried a number of them, is of repeated time-outs, failed transfers, and restrictive data limits.

Last week, I took the plunge and gave it a go manually. It worked a treat.

[Read more…] about how to easily move a WordPress website to a new web host

style guides a gogo

Sometimes finding the right word, its correct spelling, and its proper usage can be tricky.

Sometimes random writing styles from person to person in your team impacts negatively on your organisation, and what you need is consistency.

Here’s a long list of style guides to choose from that will help.

the brand of technical communications

Just back from the TCANZ 2012 conference in Auckland where it was good to have two overseas speakers pushing us to consider ‘technical communications’ as a brand, even if most of us are so deep in the trenches doing the work that we don’t get often a chance to consider how to market our ‘profession’.

But that was their main argument — that we can’t really call technical communications a profession just yet, as it lacks the infrastructure that professions require, especially the standards, independent certifications and professional development that established ‘professions’ (law, accounting, architecture, for example) have. And that having that type of infrastructure is the best base from which to build the brand.

TCANZ this year has started a process to see what steps could be taken to introduce such measures in NZ and Australia. And, with training fairly ad hoc for most practitioners in New Zealand, I am very supportive of this work. I think with measurable standards we will be more clearly able to articulate our value to employers and clients.

The working party has though decided that the sector may be too small to support a full-blown certification programme but it is continuing its work to see what would work in a market our size.

A mentoring programme is one initial suggestion — so senior practitioners would help newcomers to the sector; and that sounds a good start.

technical writer — new website

Our technical writing services now live on their own website. The site has the very original name of www.technical-writer.co.nz! 

The aim of www.technical-writer.co.nz is just to give our technical writing services their own identity. They’re a very important part of what we do but very different from our PR activities.

If you’re in Wellington (or anywhere in New Zealand, for that matter), check out our new website, or even visit our original technical writing web page.

TCANZ 2010 — a view from the inside

Congrats to the organisers of the TCANZ conference for 2010 … great speakers, good turnout, comfy, well-serviced venue and interesting discussions.

Read a summary of each of the main talks here under ‘Recent Posts’.

The write-ups come from Sarah Maddox, a tech writer from Atlassian in Sydney and one of the speakers at the event, who blogged her way through the two days as the rest of us sat and listened to the speakers. Thanks, Sarah, for getting it all down for the record and for access to some really useful tech writer resources.

(Note: if you’re reading this post some time in the future [!], the posts will likely have moved on from ‘Recent Posts’ — search for “TCANZ” in Sarah’s blog ‘ffeathers’. All the conference posts are tagged.)