The future is now

I began my computer obsession in fourth grade, when my parents purchased their first PC, a Packard Bell 486 DX-II. That thing was freaking awesome. The cutting edge graphics, combined with the awesome sound card and Windows 3.11 For Workgroups was a virtual playground for my 10-year-old self. I used to spend hours clicking away, trying to guess what file names meant and opening MS-DOS programs.

Then, it happened. My 14-year-old brother arrived home with a fresh copy of Doom II, and the fragging began. I was blown away by not only the awesome graphics and the game's ability to take up hours of my life, but also the new venue of PC gaming. I had already enjoyed Mario's enthralling storyline on the Nintendo Entertainment System, but the graphic re-enactment of my favorite action and sci-fi movies blew me away, pun intended.

About four years later, I took a basic HTML class and helped assemble the St. Francis de Sales school Web site. We also put together basic personal sites (which remained offline). I was amazed at how quickly I picked up the ability to post photos of fast cars and animated skull and crossbones. This course was the bedrock of my web knowledge.

Fast forward to highschool and my parents Dell 8100. My poison of choice was Counter-Strike, an online first person shooter which used the Half-Life engine. This game became my passion for about 4 years. A number of tournaments and competitive league victories later, I moved to San Marcos and lost touch with computer gaming. I have recently began thinking about getting involved in the industry, and I believe it would be a good move.

Cindy Royal's arrival at Texas State could not have come at a better time for me. I needed a production course, and because I did not want to work with magazines, I chose Web Design and Production. I gained more working knowledge in this course than any other. The basic HTML came rushing back to me as Cindy began lecturing on it, and I crafted a decent (albeit rudimentary) personal Web site. This course gave me invaluable knowledge into areas of technology that I had not experienced before. While I feel I know the basics, more work is needed before I would be confident enough to get an assignment and just run with it by myself.

The Multimedia Journalism course was awesome, too. By combining the web production skills with journalism, Cindy gave us a great view into the future of the industry. It is foolish to ignore the web as a means of news reporting. I believe each project was meaningful, and will serve all of us as invaluable in the future. My favorite assignment, by far, was the video project. Todd Schaaf was a great partner and his thirst for Slurm cola is insatiable.

In conclusion, I am very glad I took both of Cindy's courses and I urge anyone who read this novella to take them. However, I will always be a PC guy, no matter how "uncool" that makes me. Long live computer gaming!

Multimedia Journalism

After taking this course, I sincerely believe anyone who wants to enter the journalism field have multimedia knowledge. It’s the direction of the industry, and I’m glad I know more about these aspects of journalism.
I enjoyed the Bobcat Living projects.
My favorite was the SoundSlides project. I’ve worked in SoundSlides before, and I think it is a great tool for telling stories in a visually compelling way. It also gives you the opportunity to add audio and text.
I’ve thought a lot about how multimedia plays into journalism this semester. In the past, I hadn’t given it much of a glance. I just wanted to write.
But I am currently wrapping up an internship at 210 SA, a weekly publication in San Antonio. Originally, my job entailed writing stories. As the internship progressed, I took on multimedia assignments. My first was shooting video of an AIDS walk. Afterward, I was shooting and editing my own video on things like costume shops around Halloween and San Antonio chefs cooking with pumpkins.
Now, I have my own podcast with 210 SA that I record, edit and produce every week. It's called Art Attack, and it was a concept that I conceived and have carried through to the end. I consider myself fortunate to work in an environment that allowed me to do this. And I am glad that I learned the skills to apply my knowledge to a practical application. That has been the most rewarding experience for me this semester.
During one of our recent classes, many students said they were glad that they’ve learned how to shoot videos and make podcasts because of this class. But they said they still didn’t feel confident or prepared enough to ask for a job with these skills. I feel that my fellow students just need to bite the bullet and do it. We're just as capable of doing this stuff as the other journalism students and job-seekers out there.
I didn’t know how to edit a podcast earlier this semester, but I wanted to learn how to do it, and I learned. If my classmateas are capable of creating podcasts for class, then they have a great opportunity to apply those skills in a professional environment. The more we try and work at something, the more we will learn.
I guess my hope is that I see more of my fellow classmates taking advantage of the new prospects they have created for themselves by taking a class like this. We are at a new age of sharing and distributing information, and we have a wonderful opportunity as journalists to tell the stories we have been telling. The stories are the same. We still are guided by the same code of ethics. We are still journalists. It's our way of telling those stories that have changed.

Your/Our Future

When I was in the seventh grade, I took a basic computer class required of every student. It was boring for the most part: word processing, spreadsheets, how to un-jam the printer, things of that nature. However, one section covered web design and the Internet. Keep in mind that this was 1997 and web pages were very, VERY basic. But I was hooked.

Taking Multimedia Journalism this semester has just cemented my desire to focus on "new" journalism for my career. My favorite project thus far was making the video for YouTube. The subjects we interviewed seemed genuinely interested in what we were doing and the feedback we received was nothing but positive.

The idea of being a journalist with these new skills is freakin' sweet. Not only can we write, but we can shoot video, take photos, and make awesome Flash packages. One can now do the work of many (which is where the fear of less job opportunities comes from). It's like we're Super Journalists. But at the same time, you have to wonder if these new abilities will somehow cheapen our mission: to bring information to the masses. If all new journalists are going to focus on new media, will the inverted pyramid disappear? Are we just exacerbating our flashy culture? And with blogs, is every citizen with a computer and a rant going to be given the same privileges of old-school journalists? All questions that will be answered in time.

Unfortunately, there is not enough time in just one (or two) semesters to learn everything we need to know about the convergence between print journalism and new media. Hopefully, Texas State will get the hint that their students are interested in the subject and will provide more classes in the future. Cindy has done the best she can (no brown nosing here- she has really worked wonders) to educate us about this new field, but there's only so much that can be taught in 16 weeks.

The coolest thing about what we're doing now is that the news is no longer a one-way street; it's a dialog between journalists, citizens, and subjects. There are more voices to listen to, and that doesn't mean there are less opportunities, just more stories. And that's what we're here for; to help tell those stories in new ways.

What Learned in class this semester: Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.

When I look back on the semester in my multimedia journalism class I realize there is a whole world of possibilities for a career in this field. Also I think about all of the new things I learned about the interactive media world, like how to make a podcast, post videos to youtube and blogging. I knew before I took this class what each of these things were, I just didn’t know exactly how they were made and published.

I feel that this semester in Cindy’s class really cemented a good foundation of knowledge of web design, video and audio editing, and the future of things to come in online journalism. Before this class I had always assumed the only world for a print journalism major was reporting for a newspaper, but I now know there is so much more I could do for a publication than just write stories. I still need to do some independent learning and further study the things I’ve learned in order to say that I’ve mastered them, but Cindy did a great job getting us to where we are comfortable and confident in our skills.

Another aspect of the class that I was not expecting was to learn so much about how social networking plays such a big part in shaping the Internet of the future. Learning about applications such as second life and discussing the implications of sites like facebook and myspace was not only enjoyable but also informative (considering I already use both of them).

All in all I will hopefully go down a path that not only allows me to write for a great paper, but also maybe help out with web design, flash animations and infographics, blogs and anything else I can.

Anyone reading this who might be considering taking one of Cindy’s classes in the future I strongly suggest that you do, just don’t click the mouse while she is talking.

Multimedia Crammed into 16 weeks

Now that this course is ending, I can say that I have learned new skills, but I don't think I have learned enough. I feel like I'm more familar with terms, and I understand how things work. I just wish I had more than one opportunity with each skill. I think that we are all storytellers, but I would have liked to experiment with the camera and voice recorders a little more. With each assignment, I learned my mistakes, but I'm still confused at what separates the amateur from the multimedia professional at this stage in the game.
Careerwise, I feel like I'm only at the beginning. The scary part is that if I want to further my skills in multimedia, I will have to do it on the job. The first part is convincing someone to give me a job, and the second part is accepting that I'm going to learn by trial and error while working on real stories.
I think the blogging would have been more beneficial by having everyone run their blog as if it was on their own site. By doing this, we would be more compelled to read each others posts on a regular basis. I usually would only read a couple, because reading a dozen posts on the same topic can get dull.
For the slideshow, I would have like to go over some photography basics, and for the podcast, I would have liked to discuss what the sound of the podcast could soundlike before we started on the project.
I do appreciate the amount of information that I had access to, but I wish it didn't feel like I just crammed for my the future job hunt. In the future, hopefully a variety of multiamedia skills will be available throughout the mass comm courses.

Early Future

It's just a matter of time before the things we have done in this class and in Cindy's Web Design class become their own concentration.

A large majority of the people in Cindy's classes are print journalism majors. But there's nothing "print" about what we're doing.

We may follow some basic guidelines of print journalism (inverted pyramid), but the things we do seem more like electronic media.

But we know it's not that, either. Electronic media focuses mostly on radio and television. What we do doesn't fit that mold.

A lot of people throw around the term "new media" for what we do. That's a very lazy term if you ask me. "Hmm, there's something new going on here in the media. What should we call it? I've got an idea...."

Another name being thrown around is "online journalism." It's a pretty accurate term. But there's nothing that about it that pops out to you. It's kind of boring. But we're getting closer.

The official name for this class is "multimedia journalism." You know what? That sounds about right. We're journalists, of course, that's why we're here. But we're doing it in a much different way.

It's electronic, but in a different way from radio and TV. It's new, that's true. But in 20 years is it still going to be new? It's online, but that doesn't begin to describe all the ways news can be presented online.

No, we're presenting the news through multimedia. We can give you information on the 2008 Presidential election via a flash presentation. We could tell you how a music festival went down through a slideshow. We can analyze the latest sports news in the form of a podcast.

We're a part of the new wave of journalism. We may not know it yet, but we're going to help determine the future of the media. Radio, TV, and print will be there. But multimedia can go anywhere and we're the ones who will help drive it.

It's not going to be long before students here are mass communication majors with an emphasis in multimedia journalism.