Confessions and Future Plans

Posted by *AllStars* on Monday, September 28, 2009
Being a liberal I believe in freedom of the individual and view journalism as a valuable tool and means in the process to achieve this goal. Journalism undoubtedly plays an essential role in everyones’ lives and shape the decisions we make. As part of a journalism project I teamed up with four creative and innovative student journalists to bring you a blog of interactive ideas, views, comments and criticism on the journalism field and related matters.

Also being an undergrad journalism student, this blog is part of my search to gain a greater understanding of journalism and its undercurrents. In this process I plan to offer my fellow journalist and readers a fresh outlook on familiar matters, as well as to pose useful questions, challenge your views and hopefully mediate discussions. Using an analytical writing style on matters, I will focus on the journalistic lifestyle and explore its trends and issues. I’ll try to address as broad a spectrum of journalism related issues as possible and to investigate and show you the other side of the coin of multi-sided stories. I might also end up, along with my fellow writers, posting exciting developments from our classroom and other class related or course-required material. Besides the already mentioned, I’ll make a point of it to share interesting articles I pick up on the net as part of my writing. The goal of my posts will be to help student journalist, or potential student journalist, help understand the field, offer them an overview, and even help them make informed decisions concerning the industry and their fields of interests.

I strive to produce objective articles, and love reading well written objective articles. That said I also find a place for gonzo journalism (especially in styles such a feature stories) and some of the articles might just tend to this.

I hope you enjoy learning along with me the ins and outs of the journalism world and find interesting material or gain some insight into journalism related matters. Journalism offers us a change to understand our world, show people things they might else not see and give them the power of choice. It even teaches us about ourselves. We all know that to make a well informed decision we need to consider all options available. For the next two months this blog will be my thinking-pad with which I hope to influence your perception as a reader, challenge some of your ideas, and keep you informed of some of the happenings in our ever changing world. Welcome to the journey – may it be insightful, enriching and inspiring to you too…

*AllStars* :)

2 comments:

Flourescent Adolescent said...

How do you propose to provide these fresh outlooks ? also , if you have some sort of formula for producing objective articles, please fill me in? Dying to know!

I thoroughly enjoyed your ending paragraph, well said!!

9/28/2009
*AllStars* said...

Thanks for the comment!

With ‘fresh outlook’ I mean to give an angel that has not yet been discussed on a specific article, and I plan to do this by informing myself of what has already been written on the topic. This is not always possible however, especially when it comes to specialised topics like nuclear sciences etc where you might just need a PhD in science before you can start writing on it, or with other stories that has already looked at ‘all’ the angels. This might be a bit of an ambitious statement to make, and a fresh angel might not always be possible, but none the less I’ll try my best to find one.

On that objective formula, still working on it myself… I’m sure most of us would agree that simply being human and bringing our own background to a story makes us bias. Note that I mention both gonzo and ‘objective’ journalism and plan to use them in combination with each other. My fear with 'opinionated media' is that we often form opinions based on our own feelings and emotions rather than on information and knowledge of a matter. This is not always the case, but when it happens (as it often does on many blogs), 'opinionated media' sees it as okay. [This leaves us with our same prejudices etc as before, and doesn’t change anything] Being ‘too objective’ on the other hand might lead to an article lacking in character and not taking any stance on an issue, and generally speaking is plain boring. The debate of objectivity seems to be an endless one in the journalism world. I think that a hybrid opinion-and-objective writing style might be a good option for the time being until the perfect method is discovered, but that’s just my opinion based on a little info... :)

Please keep following us, and feel free to ask any question you’d like and we’ll try answering it to the best of our ability. Thanks

*AllStars*

9/29/2009

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