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COMM 2231

I thoroughly enjoyed this class, not only because the subject interested me, but also I like the interactions I was able to have with my classmates and community members. After my summer internship, I was very comfortable with covering athletes, the athletic department and sporting events. So, that is what I stuck with while working with the Chronicle. I wish I would have branched out more and tuned my writing style to easily accommodate other forms of reporting. Another issue that I feel that I noticed during this class that I need to work on is interviewing. I certainly can and will talk to literally anyone, so that is not the issue when it comes to my interviewing technique. I just tend to struggle with getting my ideas and questions formed in an appropriate way. I feel like no matter how prepared I start an interview I completely forget most of what I actually wanted to be in the piece. So, I have got good at making an article with the quotes and information that I do get, but I hate that it sometimes alters the piece that I complete.

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This class reaffirmed that traditional journalism is not what I want to do with my future career. I tend to extremely enjoy doing it the first few weeks. However, as the days and weeks go on I start to get seriously burnt out and then start to lack on the deadlines. So, this reminded me that I do not want to write exclusively every day of my life. I feel like it would become a chore very quickly instead of something that I want to do for the rest of my working life. That being said, I want to stay in the journalism world. I like the idea of broadcast journalism particularly. I am not sure if podcasting is one of the forms that I would like to explore to further that career choice, but I am willing to try it out. So, overall, this class and other communication/journalism classes I take continue to reaffirm that this is the ideal career choice for me.

COMM 2232

I do not know if my mixed feelings about the class are from the actual class or if from the subject matter that I choose to cover. It was not like I hated the class; I liked the class because I like journalism. I think most of any of my dislike was contributed by the angles that I choose to write about. I think that I just did not like to have a word count. I have not had to deal with that when it comes to writing articles and I did not do well with that.

The first article (feature) I was very comfortable with doing. This is what I tend to enjoy writing about, writing about people’s stories. I have written many, many, many articles like this for HD Media. I also wrote it as a look back at my coach’s first year as a collegiate head coach. So, all of this was very easy and simple to me.

The second article (multi-media) I liked doing, I changed my angle mid-way through writing it which made it slightly more difficult, but I enjoyed making the collage, the little maps and the writing. This was my second favorite style that we tried this semester.

The third article (narrative) I HATED this one. I think it was mainly because it simply did not pan out the way that I planned. I hated the way it turned out. I normally hate everything I write immediately after finishing writing it. (My mom likes to remind me that typically the articles I hate the most are my best. However, I do not feel like this was an instance of that) I did not have the large spectrum of disabled students that I wanted, and the insight that I hoped. I had to use much more of my own experience than I wanted. Jennifer and my experiences were so  that added to the difficulty of the whole thing. I was just frustrated with it and annoyed that it did not pan out the way I wanted. That is what made this one my least favorite.

The final article (reporter’s choice) I chose to write another multi-media article. I liked to be able to make pictures, graphs and everything. I had written an article last semester about the Shawnee State athletic conference move from Mid-South to River State. I wanted to add more to this article. I added end of season record stats, student-athletes education fact and the multi-media aspects. I will acknowledge my graph making skills were not as good as I thought they were. It took me over an hour to figure out how I wanted to do the travel time layout and I am still not 100% satisfied with it.

If I had to rank my articles for this semester it would be

  • 1st  Article (Feature – Pennington adds a successful first season under her cap

  • 4th Article (Reporter’s Choice - Looking back at SSU’s entry into the River States Conference)

  • 2nd Article (Multi-Media - Sisterhood within the sisterhoods of SSU)

  • 3rd Article (Narrative - Struggles and stories of disabled students

COMM 4999

 
I very much struggle with the Amy March mindset of “I want to be great or nothing”. So, podcasting is something that I wanted to try, but I did not want my first attempt to be bad. So, taking a class that forces you to do it (good or bad) or fail was a good decision for me. I don’t think that my attempt was amazing, but it was horrid. I was too short because apparently, the word count-time method is not set in stone and doesn’t work if you talk above a certain speed level. I did not do a bunch of level editing because it slightly freaked me out. I was worried that I would listen to it so much that it sounded normal to me, but like an alien to everybody else. So, I feel like I could have branched out more in the actual editing, but that even with several lectures was still freaking me out (and I do not think that anything could have calmed that). 
The writing was harder than I thought it was going to be. I listen to a lot of sports summaries, dramas, or whatever. I knew they had a script, but I guess I still thought a lot was just off the top of their head. I wanted to just talk about things, however, I needed to break it down for others who did not know what was happening. So, that part of the script writing made the subject boring to me. I had to break down step-by-step of history parts, while I do enjoy that, it was slightly boring to me. It was because I already knew about it. So, breaking it down to this season, then this season, then this season, to get to the part I wanted to talk about was a struggle for me. 
Overall, I feel like I learned basic skills in editing, but I am not super confident with it all. I will admit I was a bit hubris in my writing skills going into this. I thought that would be the easiest part, but it was more difficult than I imagined. I would like to go forward with podcasting, I think.

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