From the first few weeks of Journalism with Dennis Jertz, PhD and Associate Professor at Seton Hill University, I’ve learned the basics of journalism that I can build off of for the rest of the course. As a Creative Writing major at SHU, I benefited from the experience of learning a new discipline. From quotations to time-management, keeping this very blog in order taught me how to operate in the world of journalism.
DEPTH – Also one of my longest, Quotations, Quotations, Quotations is definitely one of my more in-depth posts. This is probably because I found myself invested in the subject, my major enhanced by the subject so I can both properly portray journalism in stories by knowing how to do it. I included an example from the text, which I ironically didn’t directly quote, because I never understood journalism as a sort of dialogue that, when done correctly, can reveal the entire character of an actual person.
RISKINESS – I rarely watch actual live television, so my Television News Exercise really made me think about TV in news ways, and only then did I truly realize how repetitive and unimportant a lot of the news is. It took a lot of time to do this assignment, so I figured I should go all in. I invested a lot of time analyzing what exactly I saw, my choice not to include sports as news well thought out. I haven’t seen TV news in a while and have yet to watch since, so it was quite the interesting experience. I remembered why I prefer cherry-picking the important news from the internet (with great caution, of course).
INTERTEXUALITY – The very last response in my Media Awareness Exercise I incorporated my favorite podcast, Welcome to Night Vale (WTNV), to the lesson. The point of the podcast is to sound real while being entirely surreal, and the writers and narrator break some rules set forth in this sound clip about radio-journalism very purposefully in order to reach the desired goal. I related one of my passions to this class which involved me more into the art of structuring journalism.
DISCUSSION – I admittedly didn’t do fantastically on sparking conversation with my classmates, although I did interact with one post in particular by Madeleine Robbins. She was interested in my WTNV reference, and I hope she is reading this and the comment I recently left to link her to it. Especially taking a journalism class, WTNV is a trip within the academic context to say the least.
TIMELINESS – Everything I posted was on-time, although not necessarily early. Well, save for this post.
COVERAGE – I never missed one assignment posted, from the first assignment with a comment (before I understood how any of this worked) to just this Labor Day weekend.
CONCLUSION – I’ve only just begun my journey into journalism, and do like the ‘learning from my mistakes’ approach that I dived into while looking back on my posts. My goals can be achieved through this lens, which include having enough journalistic skills to potentially use them in my future. I want to better understand the tight, fast-paced structure of journalism and practice research for this purpose specifically. My language is headed in the right direction, but reaching out for sources could use some work.
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