First things first, one of my main goals in this class was to improve upon my written communication skills. Speaking from a very biased perspective, I think I have achieved this goal.
Looking back on my first blog post and some of the things I wanted to learn and expected to learn were, photo production, video production and the written elements that go along with those things. Throughout this class, photography was a major point and discussion. I think as the class went on, I learned how to not only take relevant photos for stories, include them at interesting and valuable times in those stories, but how to write about those photos and create interesting dialogue based on them. That was another big goal of mine, which was achieved from the help of this course.
One of the main skills I learned however, was the art of the interview. I was always shy, hesitant and not confident in myself enough to get a good interview that was worthwhile for a story I wanted to write. During this course however, being forced to gather interviews and useful information from these sources was very valuable in upping my confidence and allowing me to become more comfortable with speaking with strangers about their passions and what they’re experts in. I learned that I must be thoroughly prepared to ask meaningful questions to get good information about a certain topic. These skills will inevitably be valuable when I get a career in a journalistic field as I so desperately desire.
The most engaging and fascinating assignment that was produced this semester was definitely the google maps project. I felt as though I was producing real content, and not just another assignment. It felt like real journalistic work.
On a different note, the most challenging of all assignments was the web story. I chose to profile a local business, and in order to write the story, I had to interact with owners, customers and employees. As I discussed earlier, this was very challenging for me, however as the assignment progressed, I became more confident in my abilities and wound up producing what I thought was a good story about a great business.
With all of these things, it’s not about the actually writing, when you have good subjects, and good, interesting leads, the stories write themselves. What this class has done for me was taught me how to pinpoint these interesting subjects and stories and allow what I’ve learned technically in the course to shine through and really profile and write good content.
-pesch
