The semester is officially coming to an end. I got the chance to take the JMS 430 Digital Journalism class at San Diego State University. I’m just going to go into a few different concepts I learned this semester, along with the assignments we had and our in-class laboratory discussions.
We learned a lot of material about the digital journalism world this semester. At the beginning of the year, we talked about what digital journalism is. Digital journalism means that editorial content is posted on the internet. It’s basically online journalism.
Then Professor Roman Koenig went into what journalists should do when trying to write a good story. He said it’s important journalists brainstorm ideas, come up with potential primary and secondary sources and even look at social media pages. Primary sources are sources that have first-hand knowledge or experience on the topic, whereas secondary sources are sources that have the reporting of others.
About halfway towards the semester, we went into visual journalism. This was one of my favorite topics. “Photojournalism is about capturing life as it happens,” Koenig said. This interests me because it tells a story and focuses on the subject in front of the photographer.
Later on, we went into data journalism. Data journalism is when journalists use the examination of statistics to enhance their story. Visually, you can show data through infographics. Infographics are visual elements that blend images and text together to convey information. When creating an infographic, I personally like to use charts to display the information I want people to see.
The last couple items we discussed was building your own presence. You want to make sure your digital presence online represents who you are. It’s important to create your own website and have social media pages, so you can display your own work and be consistent with it in a professional way.
In terms of our assignments, we had one very big assignment worth half our overall grade. We had to create a story package. The package was about writing a story based on a newsworthy topic that was somehow related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the San Diego area. This also included an infographic, pictures, tweets and an analytics plan.
I really enjoyed writing my story as I chose to write about SDSU student reactions to going online. As I was receiving information from the three students I reported on, it was very interesting for me to see that the underclassmen were definitely more willing to go online than the seniors. The seniors are upset because the chance for them to walk at graduation was delayed.
A couple things the students I reported on agreed with was that students should get money back for the switch to online since other schools have a cheaper price for classes online compared to on-campus classes. The students also agreed that the learning process has diminished because students don’t pay as much attention while they’re on Zoom compared to actually being in class.
The challenge for me when I was writing the story was trying not to assume all students from the school had the same opinion as the three students I received my information from. The only way I would have known if all students had the same opinion is if I had all students take a survey. Another challenge for me was trying to find secondary sources because my story was about SDSU student reactions, so it took me a while to find information related to that.
The infographic also took me a long time to create, but I’m proud of how it turned out. What I did for my infographic was I created two charts. The first chart showed other schools having different prices for online and on-campus classes compared to SDSU having no change in prices. The second chart I created displayed student reactions from around the world if they think online schooling is better or worse than on-campus classes. The majority of students agree that online school is worse.
For the photo, I decided to use a picture from Unsplash because it had a great photo of a student showing a frustrated face while studying online. For support evidence, I embedded tweets from the Daily Aztec to show how students feel about the current pandemic and their reactions to the school’s decisions that were being made.
In terms of the semester as a whole, I really enjoyed this class. I think making the class go online definitely made reporting and doing assignments harder because we can’t physically go to people. However, Koenig tried to do whatever he can to make our lives easier as a whole. He wrote long detailed emails to try and explain everything as best he could. He also put his lectures online, so we could all go on Blackboard and just read his lectures whenever we wanted. I thought that was more effective than other classes using Zoom because I really can’t focus and follow along with the teacher online, especially when I’m around friends and family at home.
One thing I really did miss throughout the semester because the school made the decision to go online was the in-class laboratory discussions. I really enjoyed interacting with my classmates and teachers and having an overall good class discussion. I also learned and retained information better when I heard it first-hand from Koenig.
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