The Real Journalism Experience Begins

Only semester change of the whole year: adios Living Skills, hello Beginning Journalism. I started the day more than content knowing that I wouldn’t be talking about my character and the wellness spectrum during 3rd period, but rather in a journalism classroom that would be the first stepping stone of my high school journalism career. Best part is that there are only 19 students in the class, including myself, which is probably a Paly record. (Private school kids are now thinking: What?!?! 19?!?! How do you learn in that environment??) Hopefully that will ensure achieving something greater as a result of a more unified, expressive classroom.

Our teacher asked us to share our name and why we decided to join Beginning Journalism. “I want to join the Campanile”, “I want to learn about all the publications”, and “I just enjoy writing” were the most common responses. Me, being my unique self, joined the bandwagon and said, “I like to write”. I pondered saying “Because my mom’s a journalist and I want to learn more about how she does her work” or “I’ve read the newspaper every day since 3rd grade”, but alas no, I got caught up in the moment.

Hopefully by the end of the semester, or at least by the end of high school, I’ll have an answer to that question and figure out why I joined Beginning Journalism on January 23rd, 2012. Truthfully, I’m apprehensive about not only the workload in the class, but also about the possibility that I end up hating journalism and discover that what I don’t enjoy thought I would… but hopefully that won’t happen.

My own little self-assigned homework for the class is to further my journalism through this blog and improve it over the course of the semester. Time to see what journalism is really about.

Communication Overload

How does one strike a balance between not talking and talking too much? I think that’s a fairly simple question for anyone to figure out on their own. Now ponder this: How does one strike a balance between not talking and talking too much… online? Let’s face it, the number of tools for communication at our everyday disposal is insane (not to say that I don’t enjoy it nonetheless). “Talking” online or via text is far easier socially and psychologically than talking to someone face-to-face. The problem I often face is when I feel that I have abused that luxury of chatting with someone for hours on end without any actual emotional confrontation. For the socially awkward, having such resources helps to alleviate some of the problems they face in the real world; they’re able to communicate and express their feelings truthfully, but not be confronted about it. If that’s what works for them, then good for them. But for me, I try to restrain myself from hiding behind the curtain of cyberspace every day. It’s important that what you say online is able to transcend to actual relationships. Cyber rule of thumb: If you can talk to that hot girl online, but you can’t talk to her online, you need to make a change in your life. No doubt about it, the means of communication we have are extremely useful and should be used, but not bombarded. I think one’s time of communication with someone should be maxed out at 50/50. That is, 50% talking in person and 50% talking online. And that should be the absolute maximum. Now you might be thinking, “50%?!?! Are you crazy?! Man, whoever talks to ___ 50% of the time online or via text is stupid and an antisocial idiot.” But think about for a second. Even a large portion of your communication with your best friend in the entire world is in cyberspace. Whether we like it or not, it seems inevitable in this day and age. I guess what I’m trying to say is that in the past, I’ve found myself in situations where I have talked to someone for lengths on end online and then it gets awkward when we talk in person and it’s as if we’ve never talked before, when in fact we’ve told each other our life stories online. And if this has never happened to you, trust me, it’s a terrible feeling; you feel like things should be going your way but they just don’t. So to prevent that from happening, increase the value you talk face-to- face with someone and value it, and at the same time, decrease the communication online overload. Set a percentage goal yourself, similar to the 50/50 idea, and see if you notice a difference. Trust me, holding yourself back from clicking the send or enter button is hard especially when you love talking to that person, but save it for an actual time where you can see them. That way, every second actually counts, not just every megabyte.