Week 6 Autobiographical Slice

"Oh, I want your shirt!" someone said to the teacher as they walked in.

"Okay, here!" the teacher said, and started unbuttoning it.

This is how my time in journalism started. When I first thought of taking journalism it was because I had liked the teacher when I had taken a class with her before. In general, I had no real interest in it, though I did like writing.

At first, we were mostly just learning the basics of journalism, especially since many people were new in the class. We had to get information on someone's position, office, etc. in the college. My interviewing experiences started off well as the person immediately responded to emails. This was not to continue.

I was assigned a story on the basketball team. The first time, the coach responded. But not the second, or the third. Or the fourth. Thus, that story never materialized.

Amongst all this, I was getting more into journalism the more the teacher said on it. We edited stories in class, and it was really fun to see how good she was at changing wording and rearranging/condensing sentences.

I covered the art gallery later. Several artists were on display, so I went and covered the opening. It was like an actual report, so I decided I would do well at it. I went a couple hours early before the reception. All the pictures were up, so I pulled out my (pretty good) digital camera. And I went through and picked out three works that I liked, and started taking photos of them. The librarian had sent me two pictures, but the pieces in the picture were- less than interesting. Thus, I took pictures of a photograph of a polar bear, and a painting of a bridge. I took about thirty pictures of each of them, trying to get the lighting/blur right. I had to make sure I was holding the camera perfectly still to make it perfect. So I went back and took about thirty more of each, then looked at them. Then I took more pictures...

The bridge one was very impressive. Good quotes always help an article, so I was hoping some of the artists would be at the reception. Maybe even the person that did the bridge.

Thus, when people gathered for the reception, I stood at the back and hovered. I identified four artists and their works from hearing talk. The person who had painted the bridge, a small Korean looking student, was there. Many people were admiring his bridge, and his friends were pointing him out, while he was shying away.

I figured that even though he's shy, I might consider talking to him. The reception opened with speeches, and I took quotes as a couple of artists talked. They tried to push the bridge painter to talk, but he declined very quietly.

So, I figured that I would just keep an eye on him and decided whether to approach him or not. So as he walked around in the bookcases, eating cookies, I kept out of sight watching him through the bookcases and following him. It's not like I'm good at approaching people either, especially since he probably wouldn't want to give one anyway.

Eventually, I worked out the article in my head and figured that I had enough quotes. Though a lot of people didn't recognize it as a polar bear.

I started picking up how to write articles pretty quickly. It was like a science. When the class edited articles, I contributed a lot, and when mine was read by everyone they generally all had no suggestions. I could have taken this as I knew what I was doing, or that they all had no clue how to edit. I like to think I knew what I was doing.

I wrote on the chef competition, even without the winning chef getting back to me. Then I wrote an editorial on the accuplacer.

The next semester, the teacher tried to assign roles more, and mine was proofreader and editor. For an assignment, I emailed someone, and got no response. She assigned stories in pairs to start, which made it difficult to start. I covered an overall sports story with someone else, which turned into two stories, with one about a 5k/10k race. We went and interviewed the athletic director for half an hour in his hot stuffy room with the fan on medium. I was actually fortunate that I had the other person since he used a recorder to record the entire interview. Otherwise I would have been missing a lot of quotes.

But that was about as much as he did. I wrote the article on the race, since as I was in it (a requirement for baseball conditioning) I could add more detail. He wrote the overall sports story, and sent it to me. It was a mess, and it took me half an hour to edit it to a decent level. I sent him mine, and he sent it back exactly the same.

Then, as the editor, I needed to edit all the stories. The teacher sent them to me, and fortunately none of them were as difficult as the earlier one. I changed a ton of wording, sentence structure. I tried not to change people's stories too much, but to perfect them. And it's fun. It's a science. The second time I did it was late at night. I had meant to do it over a day earlier, but was overloaded with homework from my other 5 classes. Even so, the more I do it, the more I enjoy taking something that needs a little work, and making it into something a lot better.