Reading 2

Punctuation, yayy!

No, well, actually, I hate it. Seriously? Yes. I mean, no. I mean… Okay, let’s get down to what I found was important:

1. Apostrophe/Special Expressions: words followed by another word starting with “s,” e.g. for appearance’ sake. I would have never guessed this…
2. Apostrophe/Joint Possession: possessive form after only the last word if ownership is joint.
3. Commas. I’m still confused. I think I get the Essential-Non Essential thing. I have problem with rather long sentences, where there are many verbs and I never know if I should use a comma when I write two things that I feel both belong to one verb. Well, as I was trying to think of an example, I think I got it. So, it’s all about subjects in the sentence, right? I can put a comma, if that half-sentence could be a sentence on its own. Okay, I’ll keep this in mind.

Other than these, I think the English punctuation is pretty straightforward, even though, I’m sure I’ll have to come to the punctuation guide a couple times throughout the semester.

Reading from the book

In Chapter 1, the list of newsworthiness made me think a bit. Just from the top of my I could write a couple stories and I’m sure people in IC would be interested. For example, my housemate found a maggot in the living room today at 4 a.m. There you go, proximity and novelty (Yeah, we’re girls.) Or, I just heard a couple days ago that Lindsay Lohan’s brother goes to IC—prominence, absolutely. Poor guy, the press is full of his parents’ divorce and his sister’s rehab experiences. It’s really interesting to think about what events in my personal life would make good news stories.
Then, I found something cool in the vital functions of journalism part: “Journalists tell stories that delight and amaze.” This sounds a lot better than writing hard news. I guess the authors didn’t only mean tabloids, but normal newspapers, too, to fill in this function. I think I’d love to go into this direction, where I could write about the lives of extraordinary people. I would love this for the sake of being able to talk to such people.
Objectivity is a myth.

Chapter 2:
This chapter gave me the “map” of the news industry, which is important, but I have the feeling that, as online journalism spreads, the entire process of news creating and editing will change/has already changed. For example, in a couple years, I don’t think editors will send anything to a “typesetting machine in the composing room.”

Chapter 3
Interviewing. It was good to go through again the basics, like the importance of doing background research, establishing rapport, being honest, etc. All the principles of interviewing seem really easy and nice in the book, but I feel it’s better to go out and learn how to interview people. I mean, I always keep telling myself these rules, like “Ask open-ended questions!” but many times this makes my questions artificial. Maybe I should trust my inborn communication instincts when interviewing people. I feel that having a conversation with a person, instead of a Q&A session, has a lot more worth. I guess I need to go out there, and do a lot of reporting till I can figure out the “secret recipe.”