More Class Presentations

Wow, Tuesday's class really showed off just how into these websites our class got. I think we reached a point where each one of us got addicted to our projects in a way. What I saw today from Matt and Dane and all the others was amazing. In fact, they were so good today that I am now nervous about presenting my project on Thursday.

I feel that my project is well organized and demonstrates knowledge of everything we learned in class this semester such as good web-writing techniques, however, my site is no-where near as technical as what I have seen so far from students in our class.

I took something away from today's presentations that will be of great value to me in the future. Until today, I had no idea there are so many free "widgets" available on the Internet. If you check out our class's web-sites you will see what I'm talking about. Just a few are garageband, flickr, skype, youtube and more. It's amazing and although I am a little nervous about showing my project on Thursday and am more than ready to see the remainder of our class's!!!

Class Presentations

Well, we are closing in on the end of the semester and it's time for class presentations. A few people went on Thursday and I thought they were great. I think everyone really put a lot of effort into their multimedia projects. I think the main thing to keep in mind as an audience member is that for the majority of the students in our class, we are all beginners.

I know for myself, I had never touched Dreamweaver or Flash before this class. It is amazing to see how far our class has come. I think the combination of guest speakers who are all at the top of this industry, and hard work and guidance, we have probably exceeded expectations. I think web-developing and online journalism is a work in progress even for the professionals.

Whether we learn something minor such as why we need to use a certain size and color of text with certain backgrounds, or something major like how to write for the web using our blink sheet, we are slowly taking the necessary steps to be the future of the journalism field.

Check out each member of Comm 361's website at: http://mason.gmu.edu/%7Esklein1/comm361/spring07websites.htm

Crisis Management At The Internship!

Before I talk about my night at my internship, let me first say that I really enjoyed our classes final video conference session on Thursday. We had the privilege of speaking with Sen. Tom Dachelle. He spoke about everything from multimedia to the upcoming elections, as well as his views on hot topics such as gun control, abortion and the war in Iraq. He certainly is a great speaker.

Tonight at WUSA9 sports (my internship), all hell broke loose. It was a chaotic, tense and best of all great experience. 20 minutes before we were supposed to go on the air, a major component to our sports segment was almost cut.

We had booked a satellite window with a company to receive a signal of our second sports anchor live from the Wizards vs. Cavaliers playoff game. Just 20 minutes before show time, the company called and told us they cancelled our reservation. Everyone worked as hard and as fast as possible to resolve the issue. There was a lot of pressure on me to assist in piecing together the rest of the show while everyone else remained on the phone lines trying to fix the problem. Everyone pulled together and the show aired on-time and went great.

Of course the main anchor being the person that he is, carried on with his negative attitude and left for the night without giving anyone their due credit. As an intern, you get called "hey you" a lot because most people do not bother to learn your name. If you realize that it is just part of the experience though, you'll get through just fine. As I said tonight was chaotic, frustrating and tense. It was, well, news.

Tomorrow is the first day of our classes website presentations. I'm sure they will be great. If you want to check them out, you can find them here: http://mason.gmu.edu/%7Esklein1/comm361/spring07websites.htm

See ya next post!

Andrew Nachison!

I really enjoyed listening to Mr. Nachison on Thursday. He is clearly a bright man and understands this new age of journalism as well as anyone. However, because a tragic, yet historic event like the Virginia Tech shootings occurred this week, I found our discussion about how the media has handled this event most interesting.

Most of our discussion revolved around the question, should NBC have released the pictures and video clips that the shooter sent to them. My personal opinion is that they did not really have a choice but to release it. In fact I felt the way they handled the situation was very professional. It was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If they release the pictures and video clips, everyone will be telling them it was insensitive. If they do not release the pictures and video clips, everyone will complain that one of the leading news organizations in the world did not release information that they had to the public.

Brian Williams was the first to release the clips on the NBC Nightly News and I felt he gave viewers a fair warning and clearly they did not show everything, instead it seemed as if they chose some of the less violent material to show. It was all disturbing, but from what I understand they could have shown worse. I was working in the CBS sports department when the news broke and myself as well as many professional news anchors were huddled around the television. At the end of the Nightly News, the comments from many of the CBS news anchors were "wow Brian Williams is good," or "wow they handled that smoothly."

Today with youtube.com and google's video search, everything will be leaked to the public in a matter of hours, not days. I think we now live in a world where the public can publish information just as well and just as fast as the professionals can, only professionals are deemed credible while information the public disseminates is viewed with a certain level of caution.

Tragedy At Virginia Tech

I thought our open lab class on Tuesday was very interesting. Professor Klein took a very tragic and sad event and managed to turn it into at least some sort of learning experience. Tragedies happen and no matter how much society tries to prevent them, they will happen again and again. Whether the tragic event is a tsunami, 9/11, a hurricane or a school shooting, people who care and need to understand what's going on will be in the dark unless the media is there.

To reiterate what professor Klein said Tuesday, this is a prime example of a new age in journalism. We are now in a stage where anyone can be published and anyone can provide information to anyone else. Clearly there is only one time for a story to be released, that time is immediately, right now as it happens, 24 hours a day. ASAP.

Weather it is 24 hour Fox News, 24 hour CNN, students taking video of gun shots with cell phones, or the Virginia Tech school newspaper's blog, we have entered a new age in this business. Not just journalists, but all people now need to understand how to publish information in a variety of mediums immediately, as well as access constantly updated information from a variety of mediums as news happens.

Crunch Time!

Well the semester is coming to a close in the next few weeks and I would sit here and complain about how much work I have to do but I'm sure everyone is in the same boat as I am. In the next two weeks will be dedicated to my other classes, my internship and of course my website!

So here is what you can expect to be uploaded on the site in the next two weeks. My multimedia home page will be uploaded. It will contain an opening flash document that was finished this week. The flash document will have three buttons on it that directs the user to three different pages.

The first page will be a full text story and will not be uploaded for another week or so. The other two pages will be a video page that contains an interview I conducted. It will stream from Youtube.com and it will hopefully not take up too much space. Finally, the third page will either be a slide show made with bubbleshare.com or a series of telephone interviews with players made by using Skype.com and Audacity. I will also be uploading three more video conference stories soon.

Again, if you have you go to Mason or another school and have an opportunity to take a class that involves online journalism or website designing. Do It! Two months ago, Flash, Dreamweaver, Audacity, Skype and Bubbleshare were words I had never heard before. When you are forced to work on a project over the course of three months you learn a great deal and will be grateful for it! The website is mason.gmu.edu/~cfuller1. Stay Tuned!

Rev. Pat Robertson

I would not pass up our class's video conference session with Rev. Pat Robertson for anything even though I do not think it was our best video conference session we've had thus far. I wouldn't pass it up because I think there was a valuable lesson to be learned.

There is no doubt that as he explained some of his extreme view points on topics such as war and religion, tension in the studio began to rise. As a Christian, I would guess that I would agree with Rev. Robertson on topics such as morals and a belief in God, however, it was shocking to me to here his somewhat radical views on other issues. I got the vibe, that maybe Rev. Robertson has a certain level of ignorance and has trouble being tolerant of other cultures and understanding them. I do not think he is a bad person, I just think he is a little mislead in certain areas.

What I took away from that experience was a prime example of how important it is to at least hear every person out, even though you may not agree with them. He may be extreme and have some rather rare ideas, but he has the right to an opinion and the right to have a voice. It reminds me of what my communication synthesis professor once said: "I think our country and our world would be in an enormous amount of trouble if every citizen was a republican, and I think our country and our world would be in an enormous amount of trouble if everyone were a democrat, that's the beauty of a democracy, we have both."

I can relate this to our class's video conference session with Rev. Robertson because if it were not for people like him who speak out on their extreme ideas, how would the rest of us realize that these thoughts exist and how would we be able to form counter arguments for people with similar thoughts to create a balance, much less form our own ideas that will likely be very different?

This experience taught me that the worst things you can do are to shout or throw your hands down on a table and walk out of a room. The lesson I think is, that you can disagree all you want, but you have to fight fair, which means listening first.