The journalism journey so far: Med4158

In the Live Newsroom module, I have learned a variety of skills which have enabled me to better myself in the starting 6 weeks of my journalism degree and future career.

Primarily, I have learned to set up this blog. Although I had issues making the first draft of my blog on WordPress, having remained resilient, I have published this blog which I post on regularly, as well as linking it to my social media accounts, such as Instagram and Twitter.

Being taught how to use twitter as not just a way to see what people are doing, and using it as a tool to find stories, reach put to people to interview and ask questions has enabled me to fuel my ability to write stories which are newsworthy that my audience will look at and find informative. Using the likes of Tweet Deck and Lists on Twitter enable me to quickly find what is being talked about and who is talking about it.

From this, I have been able to go and seek people to interview, and have learned how to conduct successful ones. Although my confidence in asking the questions and making the interview appear more natural than rehearsed, being able to lead with informative questions, before using tricky and leading questions to receive greater feedback and responses from the interviewee.

Writing these interviews were difficult to start off with, but the Writing Workshop enabled me to learn the structure of writing an article, focused on drawing the reader in with the top line, followed by facts and figures, then incorporating quotes from he interviews I conducted.

I have briefly been taught also how to use CleanFeed, a software enabling easy and high quality audio tracks for interviews to be produced and edited. I have not used this software a lot so I need to practice interviewing with it to gain confidence and understanding.

Most recently, I learned about the necessity of accuracy and the issues arising with fake news in modern media. By Backwards Image Searching and checking other reliable sources are two of many ways to ensure that the research being done is accurate and reliable.

Currently, I have began to use social media and local news outlets as sources of information for my own copy, as I have seen myself become a lot more intuitive and eager to find out facts on the things happening around me. additionally, I am starting to look at national stories and see how my local area is or is not a microcosm for the national summarisation, and write about things on a national level, apply them to a local level, then share my stories with people in my local area. I do this by more actively using social media to both share my stories and provide fact based opinions on current affairs.

I have also began to follow my local news outlet (B14 News) for hyperlocal news in my area to see how they find stories and produce them and I look to either work closely with them or use what they do to find my own stories on a local level.