Developing Seeds: Reflexive Piece

All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.

-Indian Proverb-

This term has been an invigorating and educational section of the year’s work. Beginning with the creation of a blog and ending with an advertisement, the term has been a hot potato of different assignments: we’ve had to jump around a lot and sometimes burnt our hands, but it has still been a fun game. Having to plan assignments within a genre has been difficult because I cannot easily change my writing style. My group has also had to tolerate a few mishaps along the way when templates weren’t working or members of the group did not arrive for meetings. However, I still believe the term has been a burst of colour and productivity.

I was productive in the sense that I completed all my work on time, received good marks for that work and posted everything on our blog. Now that I think about it, however, I notice that I only completed one additional article for the blog and one of my members completed almost twenty. This could be due to my recurring infection of laziness, but I think it’s mainly due to the lack of free time in the term.

The articles that I did complete were the assigned tasks from Alette and Sim. My stories for those articles were not incredibly original because everyone in the class had to work with the same subject matter: surviving first year. Everything we wrote – the profile, the letter, the opinion piece and the photo comic – had to pertain to first year and it became increasingly difficult to generate new approaches to the theme.

I believe my whole tutorial group experienced the same problem as I did. We often discussed the issues we were having but apart from that, the tutorials seemed a little pointless because we covered everything in lectures. Although some tutorials were highly entertaining: the image of Push shouting “Order in the class! Order! Let’s here both sides of this argument” is still clear in my mind. Creative and intelligent Push was a wonderful member to have in my team because she always encouraged and complimented the group. Tumi and Divia are also very hard-working and innovative individuals who were assets to the team.

On a scale of one to ten I would place my personal growth at eight. This course has developed the foetus of knowledge that I have on blogging, the internet and new media. The tasks weren’t as beneficial for my writing, but my knowledge gained on new media is priceless. As a group, I believe my team members and I have learnt patience, responsibility and trust. When assigning tasks to different people, I usually prepare for a future migraine. I worry that people won’t get the work done or won’t have it ready on time – this is especially worrisome in Journalism where meeting deadlines is essential. Nevertheless, I learnt to have faith in my team and their unbeatable skills.

Input from the whole team also enabled us to envision our blog’s name and characteristics: NewStreet - The Street of Life. We all painted a part of the masterpiece, some of us maxing our quota for the cause. I believe the group put so much effort into this blog because it’s our own publication. For most of JMS 1, we wrote article for an imaginary publication and an imaginary audience. NewStreet is a real publication and we hold pride and satisfaction in the way we have mastered it. Furthermore, we write articles quite often, but no-one ever sees them. This blog is a physical culmination of the term’s hard work that we can share with our family and friends.

We had to titivate the blog appearance, but written work was a more important factor. Personally, I suffered from many problems when writing my articles. Firstly, I naturally speak in an academic register, I’m not very witty and I don’t use slang. This makes my writing slightly boring for a blog, but I am definitely making an effort to correct this defect in my versatility. Secondly, I felt very confined by the theme of ‘surviving first year’. This theme has been used for the entire year and I’ve exhausted all my story ideas pertaining to the subject.

For the profile article we only needed to interview a first year, therefore, I had a primary source and did not need to verify any facts. I interviewed with ease and I think people are willing to open up to me because I’m not an intimidating or overbearing person. The other articles such as the letter or the opinion piece mainly dealt with my emotions and experiences and also did not require external sources. However, I did take care to double check my information about university rules and alcohol when writing my opinion piece.

Doubling checking information would be essential for a news blog because if you posted incorrect sources just once, you would lose all your credibility. I’m under the impression that a blog that provides new information and current affairs can be called Journalism. Our blog, however, is more of an online diary because opinion pieces and letters are issues of the heart and not news.

Speaking your mind is important, but one has to exercise some restraint when writing about sensitive issues. Personally I did not face any ethical issues because my subject matter was not particularly controversial, although my group was confronted by an ethic problem. After just one week, one of our members was in hospital and we didn’t know whether to exclude her from the group and continue or to wait for her. Luckily we decided to continue without her because she did not come back after her stay in hospital.

Blogging has been a wonderful experience. It has proven challenging, annoying and teeth-grinding at times, but my group and I have persevered. This term is the seed that will grow and flourish and produce an array of beautiful, vibrant journalism graduates.