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.