The Quest Begins

Yesterday was my first experience with the conditions a professional journalist has to deal with everyday. It began at 9:30 a.m. when we listened to a panel of professional journalists tell us about their experiences and give us tips for a career in the news industry. We took notes for the duration of the talk. After lunch we went down (literally) to USM’s student newspaper printing room to write an article about what the speakers had said. Our instructor urged us to look over our notes and just “throw up” into the computer to get started. Afterwards, we could organize our facts and thoughts into a final article. We had three and a half hours to get it done. It was then that I came face to face with the concept I had always dreaded: The deadline. Any word that has “dead” in it should always be regarded with suspicion, in my opinion. I suppose this fear could be attributed to my experience with homeschooling. At home, I could more or less go at my own pace, maybe take a walk in the middle of an assignment to refresh my brain. Of course, it’s also possible that I’m just lazy. But here I found myself trapped beneath the surface of the earth for more than three hours with nothing to do except write an article from my own notes. However, something unexpected happened. I found that one of what I had considered to be my weak points as a writer helped to save me from a terrible fate.Whenever I write a speech or an essay, I always spend a long time trying to think of ways to expand on my ideas. In short, my work has always been short. Sure enough, as soon as I started writing my article, it came out in bullet points. What I discovered about newspaper articles, however, is that they are all written in bullet points; just the facts, nothing else.I managed to complete my article in a couple of hours, long before the dreaded deadline arrived. It just goes to show that even your weaknesses can be useful sometimes.

Lizards, Walkabouts, and Photojournalism

Today, I experienced an aspect of journalism that I never had before: Photography. When I arrived at the infamous Room 115, I wasn't sure what to expect. My instructor started talking about lighting, the rule of thirds, and photoshopping. It was all interesting stuff that I had never heard before. Then he put a camera in my hands. At this point, I was a little nervous. I didn't have the courage to tell my teacher that the only camera I had ever owned was a little Kodak disposable given to me when I was eight. I took pictures of green lizards and grasshoppers mostly, while they were crawling through the grass. You couldn't really see the lizards or grasshoppers in the developed pictures, though. For that matter, you couldn't really see the grass. It looked more like a fuzzy picture of a fuzzy green carpet. Nevertheless, here I was in Room 115, holding a camera that probably cost the equivalent of my entire life savings, engaged in a conversation that went something like this: "Alright, now if you go to the menu, you'll see the tab here for the ISO settings." "Uh-huh." "Now, what I'm going to do is set it at about 1600." "Okay." "This will make it better for indoor shots, because the ISO controls how much light is let into the camera." "Sure." When he finished talking, I still didn't have a clue what an ISO could possibly be, or why you would need 1600 of them for indoor shots, but I knew better than to push the matter. After all, we only had two hours. I decided to take pictures of the group working in the newspaper room. The first shot I took was of the writers at their computers, with all of the awards previous students had won displayed overhead. I thought it was a pretty neat picture, so I took another one like it from a different angle. After that, I wasn't sure what to do next. I knew that I should probably get some face shots, but since all the students were at desks set against a wall, I didn't know how to get them. My instructor saw me just standing there and showed what he wanted me to do by clearing a space on top of one of the desks. Oh. I hopped up and sat back, uncomfortably close and in an awkward position, but with a very clear view of the typer's face. I proceeded to snap away. After I had only an hour left, and plenty of pictures of everyone's faces, I got bored and started what my instructor called a "walkabout." I walked all over USM's campus, waiting for the perfect shot to manifest itself. It never did. When I got back to Room 115 at 3 p.m., the rest of my group were already editing their photos. For newspapers, it's considered unethical to edit anything other than the size or the color of photographs, so the editing didn't take too long. After we picked two shots I had taken in the printing room, we cropped and brightened them a little, then saved them. I was done. It was definitely a learning experience, but a lot more learning will be required before I become an effective photojournalist.

The Legendary Newscasters

Yesterday was film day for my group, The Legends. For some reason, when I woke up that morning, I wasn't very nervous about working in front of a camera, as opposed to yesterday, when I was taking pictures and felt out of my depth. Feeling better about a movie camera than a photo camera doesn't make much sense when you think about it. Film is basically a stream of pictures taken by a big camera. Maybe it was the fact that I wasn't the one operating it this time. My team covered a group of 8-15-year-old kids who were visiting USM to attend a workshop about musical theater, similar to the way I came to learn about journalism. I was instructed to think of questions to ask them about their experience here. When the news crew got to the theater, the kids were in the middle of a performance. I got to see the end of the play, which looked interesting. Afterwards, when the young actors came backstage, we were waiting, notepads in hand. I was first to interview someone. I ended up being more nervous than the little girl about the whole thing. After I asked my questions, the other members of my team did their own interviews with some of the other kids. When we had all the footage we needed, our team headed down to the studio to edit it. We made a news spot that consisted of a statement from each group member about the camp, followed by a clip we had edited and audio commentary by yours truly. The whole editing process only took an hour and a half, which Dr. Leduff, our instructor, said was the shortest time in which anyone had ever done it. Of course, I can't take the credit for that. My teammates did an amazing job, saying their lines quickly and well. Miranda, Vanessa, you make The Legends truly legendary. I really enjoyed the whole process, and I'm glad that The Legends lived up to their name.

Conquering the Last Medium

Radio day. I've always wondered what it would be like to work in radio, and when I saw that Thursday was our group's turn to voice a news story, I was excited. Thursday was also the day our entire class was scheduled to go to the Gulf Coast Research Lab and interview the scientists there about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. When we arrived, Mr. Stanley, the man in charge of the radio production group, gave us cool little recorders to use when asking questions. Using a recorder was much easier than taking a lot of notes by hand, and it was more reliable, since you knew you were giving direct quotes instead of just being "pretty sure" of what someone said. If I do go into journalism professionally, I'm definitely getting some sort of recording device. Anyway, we went all over the lab, which is comprised of many different buildings, and interviewed four or five different people. The problem was that it was past 1 p.m. when we finally started back for the campus, and we had an hour-and-a-half drive to get there. That meant none of us started working on our stories until almost 3 p.m., as opposed to the 1:30 start we had been used to. The broadcast was set to air at 5 p.m. When we arrived at the radio station, the man in charge told us no one had completed their story in only two hours before. Vanessa told him not to worry, we were The Legends. I don't know if that eased his mind any, but we lived up to our name once again, delivering a good presentation in plenty of time for the broadcast. Working on the radio was fun, even under a harsh deadline, and it ties newspaper work for my favorite medium, followed closely by television. Really, I've enjoyed all the work I've done here. Yes, even the photography, Casey. I'm not sure exactly what we'll be doing tomorrow, but I'm sure I'll have a good time doing it. This is Seth Houston, signing out.