Blog 4: What I'd Do Differently

What you need to know:

1. This fall, I have gained experience on how to be a proper journalist, which has involved a strong emphasis on the importance of quality work and a perfectionist approach.

2. In my Digital Journalism course, I created an audio news story with multiple interviewees and nat sound, but I faced a number of challenges.

3. There are areas for improvement in the assignment, particularly my need for better nat sound collection and more effective interview techniques to make the story more authentic and character-rich.

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Over the course of the fall semester, I have learned—and still continue to learn—what it takes to be a proper journalist. Quality work has always been the top priority, and as a perfectionist, I often find myself looking back at past projects and looking at what I could have done better.

A major assignment in my Digital Journalism course this semester included an audio news story. With this assignment, I was tasked with creating an audio-only story that was newsworthy and included multiple interviewees with related nat sound.

A challenge that I ran into during this process was the unpredictability of it all. Though I prepared as best as I could, there were a number of small things that, looking at them now, I would change about this story.

For starters, I wish that I had dedicated more time to collecting nat sound for this assignment. Many of the nat sounds that I collected had to be pieced together, as the quality of the audio was not very good. Due to my audio story taking place outside, the sound of the wind was constantly getting in the way of the sounds I was collecting (which, in this case, was

cats meowing). The finished product of this assignment thus turned out to have choppy and unnatural nat sounds at times.

Another piece of this project that I would have done differently is being unafraid to ask my interviewees to phrase their responses in a different way. I understand that the interviewing process can feel strange for some, and an issue I ran into was that they left out crucial information that was relayed to me before the cameras were rolling. This also manifested in my interviewees not always restating the questions.

Due to this, I felt as though my tracks in the piece had to do a lot of the explaining, rather than the sound bites speaking for themselves. Ideally, I would have liked for my tracks to have been shorter and allow the interviewees to tell most of the story themselves. I feel as though it would have made the piece more authentic and given it more character.