Recently in EL 227 Category

Now that the semester is coming to a close, and I've survived half a year of Newswriting, I find it an obligation to ask myself, do i want to be a journalist?

The reading of chapter 9 involved small details. After reading the chapter, it seems to me that journalism is also like being a detective. The example that the text gave of Jules Loh finding something wrong with Herbert Hoover's pencils really showed how journalists must pay attentions to all of the information about their story. That one little point opened a whole new angle of a story.

Another section of the text was interesting to me. Involving color in a news story isn't as easy as it seems. It read, "Color implies a way of seeing a story so you can show the reader. Adjectives and intensifiers have nothing to do with it-they are, in fact, great decievers." This shows taht newswriting is more of a challenge than other types of writing. Readers need to make their own reactions to the stories with out writers telling them what to think.

Due to a 10:00 departure time for the Seton Hill Cross Country team, I will miss EL 227 on Friday, Nov. 4, 2005. Instead, I spent that class time blogging. This is the coverpage for what I've done instead of class.

This is an article in the October 11, edition of the Tribune Review. It occured in the local section. What I found interesting about this article isn't a bad thing at all. I found that the author really used the inverted pyramid method in his writing techniques. It's usually hard for me to use this because I unconsiously try to put events in some kind of order, either chronologically, or whatever. However, this author put the information about the lead towards the front of the articlce. Then preceded to talk more about the background of Gifford and his family later in the piece.

The only question I have is did the author talk too much about his background? At the end it seemed to get a little off topic. However, it still pertained to the hiring of the man named Gifford.

In the Elements of Journalism, Chapter 7 talked about Journalism as a public forum. The example at the beginning of the chapter dealt with Cody Shearer. The incident took place on the show Hardball with Chris Matthews. Her Matthews pressured Kathleen Willey into confessing who it was that threatened her(Cody Shearer). However, Shearer was not the one who threatened Willey. It was all a mistake and now Shearer has to pay the price of an angry public because of a journalist's mistake. I was wondering if this is really journalism? Is it forcing people to say what they don't want to because we want the public to know? And if they are wrong, shouldn't they apologize or let everyone know that it was a mistake?

Matthew's ended up apologizing but not willingly. He did it once Shearer's attorney had gotten invovled.

I think journalism should only be the truth. If something is doubted or not totally true, then people should have the integrity to not go out and publish it. Yes, we want our stories to be the most interesting. Yes, we want our's to get the most publicity. But I feel that the most important thing in journalism is making sure that the facts line up and people aren't getting hurt.

This is my weblog portfolio for Newswriting. Blogging is a great way to interact with your peers. This is a new experience for me so I know that this portfolio is a little rough around the edges. However, I do see the importance now of blogging and in the future I will use it more than I already have.

In chapter eight of Elements of Journalism there’s a sentence that says, “Story telling and information are not contradictory. (149)” It talks about the comparison between a comforting story and raw data. I think news writing is finding a common ground between interesting story-telling and boring information. Through many of the exercises I’ve learned that it is easier said than done.