One of my 2009 goals was to blog more about journalism, and since the BIP Week 2 project was to brainstorm a new feature, I thought a journalism-related post would be perfect. Hence, J-School Journal, a weekly post about life as a journalism grad student. It still needs a better name, but anyway… This week was the first week for the Spring 2009 semester, so I got information about the three classes I’m taking.
The first is Law of Mass Communication which covers, duh, laws as they related to media and other forms of communication. I took a class a few years ago specifically about the First Amendment, but it sounds like this course will be much broader. I also think it will lead to some interesting posts about new media and how old laws are being forced to fit an entirely new way of doing communication.
My second class is J880: Integrated Multimedia Storytelling. I have to admit, I’m a little nervous about this class, but also really excited. The whole point of the course is to learn multimedia tools and techniques for journalism — things like Photoshop, Audacity, SoundSlides, as well as social media like Twitter and blogging. One of our assignments is to keep a blog for the semester; we can either start a professional, journalism-related blog, or make significant improvements to a blog we already have. I’m still debating whether to start a second blog or work on improving this one through the class. We’ll see.
My last class is Community Economic Analysis. The Madison professional-track program requires us to take two classes outside the journalism school for our specialty area. Since I want to write for a community or local newspaper, I thought this class would be good. After the first meeting I’m conflicted about whether or not I have the economics background to succeed in the class. I’m going to give it a couple weeks, and then I’ll know for sure if it’s for me.
So there you have it, what I know after the first week of journalism school.
Have questions about journalism or grad school that you’d like me to answer? Leave a note in the comments and I’ll address them in a future edition of J-School Journal!
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I’m glad you decided to post more about journalism. I’m going to college in the fall and that is going to be my major. I’m excited to read more of your journalist-y posts!
The second class sounds really interesting to me. The other two sound totally intimidating.
Sarah: Awesome, I’m glad at least one person thinks they are interesting 🙂
alirambles: I’m not too intimated about Law of Mass Comm, but I am worried the economics class is going to be over my head. I’m going to do the first reading assignments today and see how they go.
Oooohhhh, Integrated Multimedia Storytelling is my dream class. Actually, it sounds a lot like some of the stuff we’ve done in library school.
Andi: I’m excited about it. We have three big multimedia assignments with audio, visual, and text elements. It’s going to be a really useful class, even if the software and whatnot seems intimidating.