First Post: Lectures In Week Two and Three

Due to technological impedance (namely my own), I haven’t been able to post blogs for the first two weeks before this week, the third week. I’ve tried changing the date on my computer to trick it into showing the correct date for each week so that people don’t think I’m lazy, but it hasn’t worked, so I’m just shoving them all together,  I hope that’s ok!

As a form of introduction – I’m loving journalism, it’s great to learn about current affairs and how to talk or write about it, or capture it in a photograph. It’s definitely very rewarding, despite the judgement of my friends who think that having a blog and/or twitter account  is a bit silly (I mean absolutely no offence to those who have blogs and/or twitter accounts, I am finding out the wonder of these new media, and my friends are definitely missing out on some awesome breaking news).

The first lecture, after the introductory lecture, was informative to say the least. Rod Chester (of the Courier Mail) certainly knows his stuff; experiencing his obvious talent and experience in the field was inspiring, and a journalist’s idea of journalism was interesting and instructive. Although the “inverted pyramid” of news journalism will definitely prove useful in the coming years,  an anecdote wherein he described news writing as “boring as bat shit” was a little disheartening, especially when Chester went on to explain that we will all have to write news if we are to work for a newspaper. HOWEVER, I’m sure that having an honest description of a currently published journalist’s life is invaluable. Before writing an article, I’ll definitely refer back to the instructions given in this lecture.

The second lecture, “Telling factual stories with pictures", given by Dr Bruce Redman was very interesting. The history of storytelling with pictures was particularly of interest to me, as it seems to me that we, as humans haven’t changed all that much since the cave paintings in Chauvet cave were created. Yes, we have more advanced technology, but we’re still telling stories orally and through pictures. That was quite humbling for me. Tell me if I’m going crazy, but I think that today, our Facebook photos are quite similar to the paintings to in our caves; they tell others about our lives. But I digress. The information on taking a good photo was interesting and to the point. All in all, it was a very informative lecture.

That's it for now!