Author Archives: Morgan F.

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The Many Paths of Journalism

This post isn’t really going to be following on of my previous series on my blog, but I just wanted to really put many ideas that I have in my head down into writing. I think that this could be really helpful to many people interested in exploring the field.

As I have been writing, producing, filming, and many other aspects of journalism throughout just less than a year for my school’s journalism I have quickly discovered the many avenues that one can explore in journalism.

Let’s start with the main form of media that people think of when referring to a journalist, print journalism. This is in the form of a newspaper, magazine, or other printed form, this can also be considered to be an online newspaper as many newspapers and magazines are both print and online, and many are just online.

There are many routes that a person can take while exploring this form of media. Professions include an editor, beat reporter, investigative journalism, columnist, and so much more. To be a journalist in any form of media it is expected that you have a basic knowledge of this form of media and would be able to write an article.

I have done a lot in this area of journalism, I have written several articles for my school’s newspaper, around 20 actually! This is also an easy route to follow in high school as the majority of high school’s have newspapers or even magazines to have your work published in.

My school’s newspaper is actually all online, it gives us the chance to have a more timely newspaper, easily reach our readers, and save money!

Unfortunately, this style of media is largely fading away and journalists are expected to not just behind a pen and paper, but also be able to tackle other aspects of journalism.

The next form of media is radio, while when you think of radio you often think of music with the occasional person talking. While some radio stations are used for hard news, weather, or traffic information, sports radio is very popular. In the U.S. the four major sports (baseball, hockey, football, basketball) are almost always covered, no matter where you live.

Sports radio is can also include things like play by play, color commentating, and sports radio. A more recent form of radio that can be sports related or any other subject that you can think of is podcasting. Podcasting is all online and can be found on a variety of websites like SoundCloud, iTunes, and many more. Podcasting has found more popularity due to it’s increased availability to anyone, as it has become more available for anyone to make one of their own.

I have a fair amount in this area of journalism, my freshman year and over the summer I made a podcast series for our school’s website paper about the Washington Nationals called Nats Talk, while it was a ton of fun, It was timely and I wouldn’t suggest making a podcast that is timely. Make one that is more of a feature story that you can listen months or even years later and it can still relevant or just fun!

I have also broadcasted one of our school’s basketball games and one of our school’s baseball games. I have done color commentating for each instead of play by play. Color commentating is more analysis and you tend to fill in time when the game is not in play. It’s a ton of fun and while I am still fairly new and definitely need more practice I can’t wait to do more of it.

The third form of journalism media I will be covering is TV. This includes the many news stations that you see on TV but can also include other parts of visual and audio media such as platforms such as Youtube. This includes your local stations and more national or international stations such as CNN or the BBC.

As I mentioned in a couple other posts, I have worked with PBS on several products and helped to produce a short piece about a local coding program at schools in my county, and it was aired nationally! Click on those links if you want to read more about my experience there!

Other than my experiences with PBS I haven’t done much with this form of media although next year at my school we are looking to expand this media for our program with other short feature stories. We also broadcast a news section on our morning announcements but I am not apart of that.

Overall I highly suggest being well rounded and having your foot in the door of all of these things as many media outlets expect journalists to be well rounded and know lots about all the forms of media.

I hope you enjoyed my post!

What have you been involved with?

What else do you want me to write about?

Stay tuned for more posts about the journalism field, I’m thinking about writing a post about the best colleges for journalism!

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My Work with PBS made it to NewsHour!

So a little over a month ago I posted a blog about the work my team and I have done with PBS. While I thought that getting to their website would be the most coverage that our piece would get I was so very wrong.

On April 10th, 2018 our piece was played on national television seen all across the county on that day’s PBS NewsHour episode! I was so amazing to think that millions of people saw our piece! While no of us who worked on it were able to see it live, because we found out it went like about an hour after the episode aired, it was still so cool!

 

We are hoping to continue these good pieces and we just submitted the final drafts our next two pieces so we will see how those go!

Check out the full episode that our Tiny Coders was aired on!

Check out our individual piece on the PBS NewsHour website! 

 

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The Work I Have Done with PBS

So my school’s journalism program has been working with PBS NewsHour through their Student Reporting Labs (SRL) Programs.  Three other students and I and been working them to produce feature stories. We have been partnered with them since November and it has been an amazing experience. While I will talk about that a bit more in another post, it has been super exciting the last couple of days so I wanted to tell you a little bit about that.

We have been working on a video feature story for a while now about this program called Code to the Future, which is available in three different Loudoun County elementary schools. While we are still waiting to find out if it will be made on PBS NewsHour, but it is on their website!

We also worked with them on Wednesday, March 14th to cover the Nationwide School Walkouts, which took place at my school and many others across the county. Our footage along with 15 other schools nationwide, was made into a 2-minute video and put on many different social media platforms.

It’s been such a cool experience, and while definitely stressful at times I am so proud of what we have accomplished!

Check out the feature story I helped produce! 

Check out the Nationwide Student Walkout news story I helped to film!

 

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Impact on Journalism: Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team

The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team is a team of investigative journalists at the Boston Globe. While this team obviously had many reincarnations with different people making up the team, the most famous team is the 2001-2002 team which uncovered the abuse of children that the Catholic Church had been hiding.

The team was made famous to more mainstream audiences with the release of the movie Spotlight in 2015, which starred Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, and Stanley Tucci.

The movie really shows the impact that a story can have on so many people, people in the future and the past as well. It helps give people the justice they deserve and prevent anything like that happening again.

It is such a good example of journalism that I watched this movie in my Intro to Journalism class Freshman year.

I would highly recommend this movie to anyone interested in journalism or anyone who just wants to watch a really good movie. The movie is so good in fact that it was given the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2015!

Have you seen this movie? What did you think about it?

Who or what should feature next?

Thanks for reading!

*info from Wikipedia.com

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Impact on Journalism: Katharine Graham

Katharine Graham was elected to be the President of the Washington Post on September 20, 1963, and later became the publisher in 1969 and really helped it to become the all impact full and international Newspaper it is known as today.

She helped grow the Washington Post by publishing the classified Pentagon Papers, which displayed the actual state of the Vietnam war which was quite different than what the government made it seem, on June 17, 1971, in the Washington Post. This was a big decision for her to make as the press was often close friends with those with political power, including Graham herself. This changed that as the Press soon became to be known as the watchdogs of government, which means keeping the government accountable for their actions.

Her contributions also strengthened the freedom of the press impact to the government and the people.

Journalism was often still considered to be a man’s world as this time and she was not trusted to make decisions for her own company, especially surrounding the Pentagon Papers. So much so that even though it was her father’s paper, and it was still passed down to her husband instead of her.

The Washington Post grew so much when she was in power of the paper, she got it when it was a small local paper and transformed it into what we know today.

Her success also came from making new decisions that wouldn’t have followed her father’s or late husband. She hired Ben Bradlee as the editor in chief. He would play a big role in publishing the Pentagon Papers, showing that Graham, once again knew what she was doing.

Her story was turned into a movie called The Post, which was released in 2017. Graham is played by Meryl Streep, and Bradlee is played by Tom Hanks. It is a really great film that I highly recommend seeing! Plus it was nominated for multiple Oscars!

She is truly an inspiration for any journalist!

*Info from biography.com

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How To: Write the Final Draft and Publishing

These last two steps are the final ones before your article goes out into the world to see.

Normally these last two steps are also fairly easy for the journalist as the rough draft goes to an editor who edits it. Then the journalist would fix his or her mistakes and send the article off to be posted.

Although sometimes the journalist may need to take a couple steps back to get a couple more interviews to strengthen the article.

Once published the journalist should also try to publicize their article as much as possible.

I tend to send my articles to family members and friends. While this may sound corny or kind of weird, you have put a lot of time and effort into that article and you should want people to see your work. Plus the article often pertains to their lives,  especially if they live locally.

My school’s newspaper also has a twitter which they post tweets about articles, which I repost to spread the article further to an online audience.

All of these steps are really easy but will pay off, in the long run, giving your article many more views.

What are your tips for the writing the final draft and getting your article out there?

This is the final blog in the How T0 series!

I hoped you enjoyed this series and what should I do next?

I will probably be blogging about some famous journalists in history to blend my love of journalism with my love of history, so stay tuned!

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How to: Write a Rough Draft

Once you have conducted your interview and gotten any other information you may need to write your article, begin on the rough draft stage.

To start writing your rough draft, always remember to make the article’s information going from most important to least important.

Some of the most important pieces of information include, what this article is about- just a brief overview of what you will be covering. Also include any dates, locations, or names to set the stage for the reader. This first paragraph should encompass the main topics and a basic level knowledge, a reader should be able to read the first paragraph and know the most important parts of the article.

The rest of the article should be giving more detail and information on the main topic and just be giving more detail.

The paragraphs should be fairly short, with three sentences being a good base number to start. This makes the article seem less intimidating to the reader.

Use as many direct quotes as you can, this shows that you are reliable and your content can be trusted. When quoting someone multiple times, use their full name the first time, and then refer to them as only their last name. Also when saying who said the quote, say, said their name, after the quote.

Another way to enhance your writing in quotes is to use brackets in quotes to make the quote smoother and to put it in context.

The article doesn’t have to be long, and tends to make more sense and is better when shorter! This keeps it short and concise and right to the point, although if you have a lot of information that is very important to the story then include it all.

A good way to end your article is a quote, a good time to find these quotes is when you ask, “Is there anything else you would like to add?” The source tends to wrap up what they have said thus far, which makes for a good ending.

What are your tips for writing a rough draft?

Stay tuned, next I will be talking about how to write your final draft!

Also, check out my article about College Advice from Former Students, which is a good example of taking your information to formulate it into an article!

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How To: Conduct a Face to Face Interview

 

Your interviews are the most important part of you piece. It’s where you get all of your information as well as proving to your audience that you are creditable. I am also talking about the face to face way of interviewing, as over email is self explanatory.

When preparing for interviews you should bring a charged device that can record with, a writing utensil, a notebook, and your interview questions, which you should have printed off or have on a loose leaf sheet of paper.

First start by asking them if you can record. Then get their name, also ask them to spell it out so you make sure you spell it correctly on your article.

First if they source allows you ALWAYS RECORD INTERVIEWS. This helps you to quote them word for word, which is very critical more recently. This also allows you to have more of a conversation with the person rather than just a questionnaire and you justing writing down every word they say. This also gives you more of an opportunity to find nuggets of information to ask follow up questions with.

While I do suggest taking notes, I often find myself not taking notes and just focusing on the conversation because I know I have the recording.

Also look at any opportunity to ask follow up questions, as the source things may bring up things you didn’t even know about which may even led to your article taking a completely different direction.

At the end also ask if they have anything else to add, this question tends to led to good quotes.

After you finish your interview I suggest trying down quotes and information from the interview in a word document (word for word), this makes the rough draft a but easier to put together.

Most importantly make sure you quote the person correctly as misquoting someone could led to you loosing you creditability or getting in worse trouble.

What are your tips for conducting interviews?

Stay tuned, next I will be talking about putting together your rough draft!

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How to: Research Topic and Interview Questions

Once you come up with your topic the next step is to gather the information in order to write the article. In order to get this information you need to follow some steps first.

Start with doing some background research that can be accessed without an interview, if there is a website that heavily talks about what are you writing about use that as much as possible. Look for data that may be hard to get from an interview. You should also use the information that you gather to help you develop interview questions and the individuals to interview.

You should have at least three people quoted that you interviewed in order to get as much information as possible. While there may be a few exceptions, but the majority of articles fall under needing three sources.

Your questions should answer the who, what, where, when, why, and how questions that you do not have the answer for. I suggest having around 4-7 questions. Your last question should always be “Is there anything else you should like to add?”. This lets your source add anything that you may not have known was even taking place, and therefore a better article.

Placement of the questions order is also critical. Start from easier questions to harder ones, this allows the source to begin thinking about the subject you are interviewing them about which will lead to better answers and quotes.

Once you come up with all your questions the next step is setting up times to interview your sources or finding your sources to interview.

My preferred method is emailing the source to schedule the interview, it leads to less stress overall and gets everyone on the same page. When emailing a source I first introduce myself and say who I am, this includes that I am apart of my school’s student newspaper (or whatever you are writing for). I also say why I would like to interview them, and what I am writing about. Most importantly I say when I am available, this leads to them already having times to pick from, rather than them having to come up with a date and time all on their own. I also suggest sending a confirmation email to make sure you are on the same page about the time, location, and date.

Another method is tracking down the source without any communication before hand. I have only done this twice successfully. Only resort to this if it is day of article or you cannot find this persons email or they were not responding the their emails. While this methods works, you just have to know when and where this person is. It probably takes some practice as well, and I just don’t have that practice just yet.

What are your tips for coming up with questions for interviews or anything I discusses above?

Stay tuned, next I will be discussing my tips for conducting an interview!

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How To: Find an Article Idea

I will beginning a series about tips and the steps of how to write a great news or feature article. I’ll be writing separate blogs for each step of writing an article. The first step to writing an article is choosing an article topic to write about. There are many different types of articles that may differ in this step of your article but we will be talking about the news and feature story.

This step is fairly easy for a news article. If you are a student, think about what is going on in your classes. Is anything coming up? Are their any changes? If you still having nothing after that, talk to people, see if they know of anything that could be a possible article.

Also visit other local, national, and global newspapers websites and see if there is anything written in there that may spark an idea that affects your area and audience.

When choosing an article idea, you need to think about a couple things before you begin. Who is my audience? What is the purpose? Where is this happening? Why is this happening? How is this happening?  A good way to remember these questions is WWWWH, or who, what, where, when, and how. If you are able to answer all these questions or incorporate them into interview questions, which is the next step, then you have a great an article on your hands.

Be very open to taking up articles that may not seem that interesting. In the beginning of this school year I got to topic on cockroaches in some of the classrooms at my school. In the beginning I was hesitant and I wasn’t super interested in the situation. But the more I dug in, I began to realize how big this problem was. The information I discovered forced the school to improve and solve the issue.

Your article can make real change and you never know which what that change might be until you write the article.

Do you have any tips for coming up with new or feature article ideas?

check out my article about cockroaches at my school!Click here!!

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