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Monday, May 10, 2010

Reflection on the podcast- AS IT IS

At first glance, I thought that creating a podcast was going to be a mission that will require a lot of time and effort. All I could think about was the number of sleepless nights and arguments that were going to arise as a result of disagreeing on the format, jingles, stories and so on.

The first big challenge was pitching the stories that we did and make them fit into the agency document that we drew up at the beginning of the year. Our stories had to be relevant, outside of campus and have that so what element to them. They had to be informative, educational and unbiased and show a thorough balance between all parties concerned. At times when you start pitching the story, all that was said and agreed upon on the agency document falls out the window as the prime objective is finding the story and the rest will follow afterwards. Unfortunately it never some of the things that fell out of the window did not come back in when I actually ran with the story.

I did a story on the municipal strike that was taking the whole country by storm but my focus was on what it did to Grahamstonians and how it affected them. After listening to the story being played over and over again after we had done our podcast, I realised that I had omitted the view point of the strikers and in the story, they are the ones made to look bad but I didn't even consider interviewing one of them and ask them the reason behind their actions. In that way, I failed to stick to the requirements of the agency document as I failed to be neutral and overlooked the opinion of the municipal workers. This was because I failed to go back and look at the guidelines that were going to lead me to a constructive and newsworthy story, I got lost in the story.

Working in a group showed me how diverse our thoughts are as individuals and how when we put all our unique talents together we can actually produce meaningful and sound journalism. The way in which we wrote the script and arranged our packages was done as a team thus it being done well. The normalizing of out packages was on point as we critiqued and gave each other valuable input in putting together their stories.

In the next podcast, I will be sure to do things according to the guidelines that we had set for ourselves. In so doing, I will be reminded of the creativity and responsibility that I have as a journalist to deliver news. If we keep on working as a team and keep being professional in our production of news then the next episode of AS IT IS should be better, informative, creative, educational and adhere to all that the agency document states.

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