Friday, April 4, 2008

Take a deep breath on Monday, Remember Life is Awesome Tuesday, and Change the World as a Journalist starting Wednesday!

Things are looking up. For the first half of this semester I have been stressing about being a good journlist, leader, and ensuring that I have a future after Missouri and the J-School, and even after I found out that I would be working for the Oakland Tribune this summer and participating in AmeriCorps in the fall I still felt like I hadn’t done enough.
Also, being here over spring break was good, because I did get and article and a brief, but I wonder if time away would have been better for me.
The main point is that things are going well both intellectually and emotionally, which on some level I don’t know how much you can separate. My boss in London, Denise Parkinson, once said “Your emotions are your intelligence.” I believe this is very true. I realize when I am happy and energetic about my work a lot more gets done.
I am very excited about a story I am currently working on. I wasn’t very excited about the story when I first started, but I know feel like great things will come from this story. I actually have realtors calling me to showcase property that they have outside of Columbia! After just a few phone calls its like the information just fell into my lap.
Next week is going to be so crazy though. My plan is to eat, breath, and sleep Columbia elections from Monday night through Wednesday morning! It’s going to be awesome!
I must say I also enjoyed the discussion on race coverage in the Missourian. I think that more discussions about identity and privelege should be discussed in the news room.
Often it seems like sociological issus are grouped under political issues, which I would agree they are political issues, but I personally believe that valuing these discussions as political discussions often emphasizes a more masculine “hard hitting” angle on journalism, and devalues concepts of group identity and social constructs and often praises the status quo. And we all know that journalism has a propensity to perpetuate the status quo.
Beyond that like is awesome and I am very interested to see where my article ends up!

No comments: