6 posts tagged “journalism”

Well, I'm sitting around the computer lab waiting around for a source for my sidebar story. I think I just need one more person, but since I can't interview comm majors I don't know too many people to talk to. I contacted everyone I could think of in hope they could either be interviewed today or know of some people that I could interview.

This evening is going to be hectic. It takes a while to crank out stories, and this time I'll be cranking out two. My professor approved of the ideas, so that's out of the way. I don't think I'll have too much of a hard time. I'll just have to stay focused. I could stall a bit on Friday to squeeze one more interview. Takes 10 points away (it's an 100 pt. assignment) if I don't have enough sources, so I'm not too bad off. However, I do like to get as many points as I possibly can.

In the mean time, I was thinking about creating a news blog...the only thing is I don't really know what to do it on. I should do one since more and more journalists are blogging. I thought about having a site that was dedicating to bringing important, underexposed stories to the forefront. It'll be a project that I'll start in the summer, but I need to figure out what I want to do for it. Any ideas?

So today wasn't as busy as I thought it would be...which is a bad thing. Now all of my interviews will be on Wednesday and Thursday. It's beginning to look like I'll be spending most of Thursday night working on my stories. Again, this is what I get for procrastinating, but hell when you feel like you need time to do other things in classes and get some sleep it's kind of hard to take the extra time to do interviews and write articles. It's not a fast process at all.

Some sources are not getting back to me so I'm going to have to scurry for some. I still haven't touched up my story memo so I'm going to have to scrape up something.

I've been up since 5:30 this morning gathering quotes and writing questions for phone interviews today. The story is due tomorrow, but because I have to go to the doctor I need to get it done tonight and send it to him via e-mail. I feel really tired, but I have an interview to do at 11:30 a.m. today and one at 1 p.m. I took today off because I wanted to make sure I get this story done.

So now I'm going to take a break. Usually I keep my cool, but I still want to kill my professor for not sending me an e-mail sooner or calling me to tell me that he approved my story memo. GRRRRRR!!!!!!! It is getting me to question if going into media is the right thing for me.

For the past ten minutes I've been trying to make up a parody for this song expressing how I'm beginning to detest going to class, but I have failed miserably so I will not share what I came up with. This post will be boring as hell to read, but if you're curious about what I have to do for classes this week, please feel free to read on.

My classes are driving me insane!!!!!! I think I'm just tired, but I feel as if I'm overwhelmed with stuff to do for classes. For reporting for mass media, we have to do a personality story. The story memos that I turned in today were not for a personality story because I didn't know that's what my professor wanted. So I have to pretty much send him another story memo! I'm really happy that we only have four stories to do for this class because I have a much longer time to get a story done than if I was doing this for my school's newspaper. So cranking out another story memo doesn't throw a wrench in my plans of getting the story done early. Tomorrow evening I'm going to have a chat with a guy who is in a club called Good Deeds for Trees. I'm hoping I can get something on him, because I really don't feel like doing anything else. I think it would be good because he's actually making an effort to improve the environment. The dude seems really passionate about what he does so maybe he'll be really interesting to interview.

I also have a query letter to write and I need to write out a résumé for the same class. The query letter is a letter that you send to a publication telling the focus of your story, why it would be good for the publication to print it, why you are qualified for writing the story, and pleading with them that they except your work. I have no idea what I want to write about, but I do have an idea of who I want to write it for: Bitch Magazine. It's a feminist magazine that I heard about a long time ago on some morning talk show...it was probably over the summer, not that it really matters when I heard about them. I checked out some of their stuff, and it's pretty good. I now just need to figure out what would be a good topic for me to write about for them. And this is due Friday, so I have a few days to mull over this. The topic can change over time in the query letter since the actual story is due at the end of term, so I'm not too worried about this. However it would be nice to have a good idea so over term I could write it out before it's due.

But of course I have other coursework to do for the other classes I'm taking. For my core 250 class I have to write a reading response for Antigone. I read most of it, but I don't have time to read it all so I'll use those handy dandy Sparknotes to find out what happens in the end. Then we have to try to relate it to what we're learning in class about Plato and Aristotle. Luckily this is a one page, single-spaced response so I can bull shit my way though it. It doesn't have to be right, it just has to be turned in. We also have to write up a personal reflection, in which we are supposed to take a topic that is in the news and apply Plato's and Aristotle's ideas of metaphysics to it. I was hoping they would have posted up the prompt over the weekend so I could have written it out then, but the instructors decided to...well I shouldn't say ass around...well, I can because they could have wrote the prompt out last Friday and posted it up on blackboard. Again, it's a one pager so I think it won't be that hard to do. I'll probably wake up early tomorrow to get those done and out of the way because I just won't have time to do them any other day of the week.

For international relations, we received the questions we'll be quizzed on this Friday. I'm really glad that he (the professor) sends us these questions because that way we don't have to look around for the stuff in the book. It's a timed quiz too so it's good to have the information printed out. I hope he uses these questions in our exam too. I don't know if he does...I should check that out in the syllabus.

Lastly, for radio broadcasting I still have to figure out what I'm going to do. Thank goodness that I got to do the radio show last Saturday because I know know that the wireless internet we have on campus sucks ass! I wanted to play some songs from my imeem playlist. Although I was getting a really good signal, it took about 10 minutes for a song to load, and then sometimes it wouldn't load fully so we had to scramble to find another song to put in the CD deck so we wouldn't have a ton of dead air. On Wednesday, my group and I have to go on air for two hours, and I have a thirty minute segment at which I was supposed to present international hip-hop groups, but imeem isn't going to work. I might try using limewire...I don't know. I'll figure out something. But I'm thinking that instead of hip-hop, I'll do international pop and that way I don't have to worry so much about if there's cursing in it. I have to come up with something soon, though, because I need to write a script.

I just looked through all of this, and I realized that I spent almost an hour writing about coursework. I really can't believe I spent all of this time writing about coursework. I really need to do something other than sitting up in my house and doing fucking coursework.

Tomorrow I have my first radio show. I am co-hosting with a classmate. Because we aren't in the big broadcasting class (and it's our first time doing radio), we are doing format, which means we just play music that corresponds with a color wheel that is in the studio. However, we have to do PSA's, News, etc. I don't know if we have to have a script or what, but I'm just going to bring my laptop and what not,  so I can look up news and weather.  Really, my co-host (I get to say co-host!) and I should have talked more indepth about what we want to do, but whatever. I don't think many people are going to be listening to us. We have the 11am-1pm time slot.

After that I'm going to be stuck reading a ton of stuff, trying to come up with ideas for two story memos, studying for tests that are a couple of weeks away (see, I'm avoiding procrastination), then reading more stuff and trying to outline a few essays. I've been keeping up with all of my classes except for reporting for mass media...well, I'm still sort of ahead of the game. I just am having problems coming up with news ideas. We have to write a query letter soon for a publication that we are interested in sending a story to. However, I haven't found a publication that I want to send something to nor have I gotten an idea (well two ideas) that is easy for me to tackle, yet deals with young adults everywhere. I was thinking about doing a story on "quarterlife crisis," but I don't know how I would approach it or who would want to hear about it. Any ideas, guys?