Former Bucks journalism student Tom Sofield is a Bucks County resident and young editor, reporter, publisher, and entrepreneur. He founded the website called LevittownNow.com.
LevittownNow.com is a digital hub, where community members from Bristol, Falls, Hulmeville, Langhorne, Penndel, Middletown, and Tullytown can read the latest news and contribute their viewpoints. The website features stories about police, fire, courts, government, schools, sports, community events, local commentary, and components of local residents and businesses.
The business is based in Bucks County and all of the journalists have roots established within the community. Sofield has a few people that work for him as journalist and editors, helping to push the website to its full potential.
Sofield’s employees primarily work from home, so it is a bit more difficult to enact deadlines for the various stories that the journalists are working on. They have staff meetings about once a week, and aside from that they communicate very frequently by phone.
For Sofield, being a journalist provides a lot of different experiences and opportunities to see behind the scenes. He says, “I have participated in a bunch of cool things like one time I went up in a hot air balloon, which is something I never would have done if it wasn’t for work. And also you meet a lot of interesting people like drug dealers and people who have pet goats.”
Within the TV news stations, there is not much investigation into the facts. A lot of times, TV news stations focus on getting the information out fast rather than factual, which poses a big challenge for Sofield and his employees.
When people watch the news on TV and see the false facts, then read the stories on LevittownNow.com and see the accurate facts, they tend to believe what they see TV. As a result, Sofield receives tons of emails complaining about his information being inaccurate, when actually Sofield’s information is straight from the source.
Some skills that Sofield recommends aspiring journalists pick up is the act of improvisation. When journalists run into problems like a forgotten pen, or a cell phone with no battery, they need to be able to improvise in order to gather the information to write the story before their deadline.
Another skill: when writing a story, let go of all bias. You need to focus on the facts and the thoughts of others, and form it into a story.
Social media is a very important aspect to the career of a journalist. To promote their stories or businesses, social media is the perfect way to reach the masses. But keeping up with social media can be a big task, and something that can be easily forgotten.
Journalism is a reinventing itself with this new era of technology, but it is most definitely not a dying field. People need to get their information from somewhere, and journalists are able to provide that information.