Self Reflective Statement
- danieldmello415
- Apr 14, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 15, 2022
Over the first seven weeks of this semester I’ve learnt a lot about writing and producing news articles, and the various procedures journalists must follow.
Firstly I learnt about the importance of inclusiveness and diversity in a newsroom, and how much it can benefit a news team.
Tara Ross’s chapter inclusive journalism talks about the various benefits a diverse newsroom can have (Hannis, 2014).
This diversity can range from culture and ethnicity, sexual orientation, and a persons physical abilities (Hannis, 2014).
These readings helped me learn that if you have someone close to the issue reporting on the news it can have a vast amount of benefits, and this is precisely what happened in my second news article (Hannis, 2014).
The fact that I live in the neighborhood where the issue written about in the article was happening helped me understand the struggles and frustrations many residents were experiencing, and it even helped a few residents open up more than they usually would.
Through the weekly readings and course resources I learnt how an interview could be a short 30 second conversation, or even a 60 minute long q&a session (Sedorkin, 2020).
Reading Sedorkin, G. (2020) helped me realize an interview doesn’t necessarily mean having a lengthy discussion with a person, it could simply be a couple of questions and that would be enough for an article, and therefore that’s precisely what I did with my second news story (Sedorkin, 2020).
Rather than sit down and possibly annoy people who were busy, I simply asked them 1 or 2 questions about the situation so that I could have their view on the issue without ticking them off.
Undoubtedly however one of the most interesting bits so far was learning about the procedure on how to write a news story, and the inverted pyramid structure.
I learnt about the inverted pyramid structure, and the importance of following it when writing a news story (Hannis, 2018).
This structure helped me with the process of writing both my news stories.
At the beginning when we were given the information, I was a bit lost on how to structure the story. However upon reading and following the inverted pyramid structure, I was able to construct and write two news stories without any issues or hassle (Hannis, 2018).
Finally due to the weekly readings, I learnt how to caption a picture, as well as the rule of thirds and it’s importance.
Learning about the importance of the rule of thirds was especially useful as it was extremely helpful for the second news story.
The rule of thirds helped me learn about how I can use gridlines, and the spots where grid lines intersect to create hotspots in my picture, and this was very effective when producing my second news-story (Caple, 2013).
I was struggling to properly caption my picture and was a bit worried about confusing readers with the caption, however through the week 5 readings I figured how to correctly write a caption without causing confusion or trouble for the reader (Alikhani et al., 2019).
References:
Hannis, G. (2014). Inclusive Journalism. In Intro: A beginner's guide to journalism in 21st-Century Aotearoa/New Zealand (2014 ed., pp. 62-74). New Zealand Journalists Training Organization.
Sedorkin, G. (2020). Interviewing: A guide for journalists and writers. Routledge.
Hannis, G. (2018). Intro: A practical guide to journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand (2018 ed., pp. 199-217). Massey Texts.
Alikhani, M., & Stone, M. (2019). "Caption" as a coherence relation: Evidence and implications.
Caple, H. (2013). Photojournalism: A social semiotic approach. Springer.
Comments