Sunday, April 26, 2009

Evaluation

As my last blog assignment for the semester, I thought that I would end by giving a quick overview of my thoughts about Borderbeat and the class as a whole.

For me personally, Borderbeat has been one of the only journalism classes that I can actually say that I have enjoyed myself in. Though in journalism there is always a certain amount of pressure, our professor, Jay Rochlin, allowed us to have fun with whatever we were working on. Realizing that there doesn't always have to be stories done on serious topics, we were allowed pretty much free reign with our stories, allowing our imaginations to run wild.

Though I got off to a slow start, I eventually got really involved with the class and began to enjoy learning how to write for an online news website. Once I got familiar with it, it became easy and, I daresay, fun to put a story together, complete with some sort of multimedia like pictures or an audio piece.

I think my favorite part of the whole process, however, was to see the finished product up online for anyone and everyone to see what you spent so much time working on.

It is one thing to cover a city council meeting and write up a story and turn it in for a grade, but it is a whole other thing to make up your own idea and do all the follow up to make sure you have a great story and then see it published. It's just a great feeling.

I also enjoyed the ability and option to work with one or more reporters on a story. As they say, two heads are better than one, and it is nice to be able to work with other people every once in a while to learn from them and learn more about yourself.

I opted to be a part of the editing team and I must say that it wasn't nearly as scary as I thought it might be. We are all pretty willing to help each other and, at least for me, it has worked out pretty well. It was also a great thing to put on my resume and I believe it helped get me into a graduate program that I had applied to.

Overall, the experience and knowledge that you gain in this class is not only vital, but Jay tries very hard to make it fun and worth while.

I am very happy that I chose to take this class and think that it will greatly help me in the future.

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