Mr. Zou to Show Screening of Tough Guise

A screening of the movie “Tough Guise” presented by Mr. Zou will be shown tonight in Chambers Auditorium at 7 p.m. The presentation is sponsored by the Women’s Center.

The Mr. Zou series have talks geared towards masculinity and men on MU’s campus.

“I think this is an incredibly important documentary for both men and women to watch,” Women’s Center Nicole Silvestri said.

The documentary will discuss masculinity in society and how it places unrealistic pressure on men. The movie also addresses how men have to put on a disguise of toughness and emotionlessness for society.

#SB13

I’ve thinking a lot about Spring Break 2013 this week. Although I didn’t really do much, seeing as I just went home for break and all, I do miss just hanging out with my family, friends from high school and the overall relaxation of a break. 

The first weekend I was home my dad and my sister were in Indiana for my sister’s volleyball tournament, so it was just the two of us and the dog, of course. We went to Genghis Grill, my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE restaurant, on Friday and then saw The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, the new magician Steve Carell movie on Saturday.

Then, came the Snowpocalypse (part 5?) on Palm Sunday. I woke up early Sunday morning because I didn’t know just how much it was going to snow and I thought my mom and I were gonna go to church, but that didn’t happen because it snowed all day. I went outside for a little bit, because even though this was back in late March, I can’t resist a good snowfall and took some pics on my camera. Dad and my sister came back around mid-afternoon and since it was still snowing then, I had to help push the car up our snow-covered driveway. 

The snow eventually melted up Wednesday though, and by Friday St. Louis had a high of 60! It was great. During other parts of my break, I just watched a lot of TV, went for some jogs in preparation for my 5K (which happened yesterday, yay!), went shopping a few times and mostly just hung out and relaxed. Even though it may seem like I didn’t really do much, I did have fun over my break and I wonder when my next chance will be to really take some time out and catch up on life, although I’m glad to get snippets of relaxation at school here and there, it’s just not the same.

Social Media & Today’s World

This week during lecture a few of my classmates gave a presentation about social media along with sharing a basic understanding of 1) the most popular types of social media, 2) responsible use of social media, 3) examples of social media use and 4) how your identity on social media reflects who you are (whether or not it’s true.)

 In today’s age, there are so many different types of social media for people to use. There’s GooglePlus, under the superhead of Google, which also includes Gmail, YouTube and various social networks like GoogleDocs. Although I personally have a GooglePlus profile, I don’t use it because no one that I know, interact with or share news and content with use it. So, even though I think GooglePlus is a pretty cool site, it hasn’t reached it’s full potential yet which is a shame. 

Other types of social media sites include: Facebook, the biggest site of them all which works well for big companies that already have a big fan base; Twitter, which is really popular among journalists and blooming businesses and is great for short/instant updates and has a great search engine. These sites are the most popular of social media websites for a reason – they’re successful at what they do, and they please two different types of people. People who want to have lengthy discussions about news and their thoughts (Facebook), or those who only want the WWWWWH of the story (Twitter).

Next, there’s Foursquare, a location-based “check-in” social networking site that a lot of people use only on their iPhones and LinkedIn, the professional social media site for people who 100% want a job and care about what their online identity looks like to other people. I have no experience with either, (but most likely, I’ll probably be getting a LinkedIn profile soon).

Then, there’s the categories of Blogs/Video Blogs (Vlogs), I keep a personal blog on the website Tumblr, but I have never posted anything on YouTube or any other type of video-social-media based website. I think blogging is a great way for someone to share their thoughts on news in even longer-form than the length debates on Facebook. (I also just read this awesome blog about the Iraq War from the point of view from a soldier on the 10th anniversary.

The second part of the presentation was about responsible use of social media. This part was mostly a review for me, because as an avid social media user ever since 2007, I’ve learned from experience before I ever took a journalism class What Not To Share and What’s OK to Share the hard way. Also, I’m very aware that companies look at social media sites when hiring new people.

Thusly, this leads me to the last part of the presentation and the most important part of social media. Your identity, both with written and visual. Both are extremely viable to how people who don’t personally know you or going to have an impressionable view of you (like people who want to hire you.) Basically the jist of this was don’t post anything that you wouldn’t say or do in front of a room of future employers.

 

Learning from an Expert

This week during lecture, we watched a video of KOMU Reporter Sarah Hill who is known for her special TV-News style stories called “Sarah’s Stories.” In the video, clips from some of “Sarah’s Stories” were shown and Sarah shared some very important tips and pieces of advice when creating a TV-News style story. 

Some of her advice includes, but is not limited to: writing for the ear is making it appear as if there is no script, write with active voice and don’t be afraid to change your script because you know you probably will. One thing I really liked about this video was that either directly before or after Sarah would share a piece of advice, a clip of one of her stories being showed would correlate with that piece of advice.

For example, another piece of advice Sarah shared was:  Change your pace to echo the sense of the story and one of her stories that correlated with that piece of advice was a story about a man who made really decorative Christmas lights every year, but the kicker of the story was that the man was blind. When Sarah revealed this important piece of information, her voiceover tone changed noticeably. 

Sarah also said that with a dramatic reveal, you don’t always have to stick to the rules and if the story is not a strictly “just the facts m’am” story, then you can have a dramatic surprise in the middle, which was what she did for the Christmas lights man story. 

Another important piece of advice Sarah shared was that viewers care more about natural & ambient sound than voices, a prime example of this is Sarah’s story A Club “Shirley” Bonded by Their Name in which Sarah let the interaction of the “Shirley” club members be the dominant part of the story than her own voice, and even the “Shirley” interviews.

Overall, I’m really glad that Sarah Hill was able to share her advice with us (albeit it being over a video) about good ways to make a TV-News style video because even though we have already done that part for our J2150 section, it will be good advice to have when doing the Final Project and good to have after J2150 has ended and into other journalism adventures.

My Love of Strategic Communications

So, this week during lecture we had the second half of guest professors who came and spoke to us about what to expect when we get into our sequences. This week, guest professors from the Broadcast, Strategic Communications and the Print and Digital sequence came in and spoke to us. While it was interesting to listen to what the Broadcast and Print and Digital majors have in store for them, obviously since I’m a Strategic Communications major I was more interested in what the Strategic Communications professor had to say. 

First off, out of all the specific interest areas that you can have within Strategic Communications: research, account management, media planning, interactive, public relations, copy writing and art direction, I think I most want to do research because I’m most interested in how Strategic Communicators create a desired response from their audience through advertising, public relations and digital and social media. 

What really appeals to me about working in research is that I want to understand and learn how I can create something to appeal to a specific audience. (The most famous comparison I can think of is Mad Men’s “A Basket of Kisses”.)

How can I tailor an ad to fit one demographic? How can I tailor an ad to fit more than one demographic? What is the best way to advertise for a certain product, and what’s the best way to advertise for a certain product for that target audience?

These are questions that I want to be able to explore and learn about in my Strategic Communications classes next year (and from what I gathered from Professor Swanson’s presentation, I will.) 

While the research side of Strategic Communications is most appealing to me, I also would be interested in doing media planning or interactive because I’m interested in how the digital world and social media has become such a big part of today’s journalism and advertising world.

For example, Twitter is the most common social media site that people associate with the media. (Twitter even has a separate page dedicated to how the media can use Twitter for their advantage and specific field.) I think it’s amazing how powerful Twitter is as a tool to every type of journalist, and I think learning how to further my usage of Twitter through my Strat Comm classes will be very exciting.

Overall, I’m excited to explore the world of Strategic Communications next year and really dive into how to write, design and create catered for a specific audience.

Appreciating the Depth of Journalism

This week during lecture, we had professors in the convergence, photojournalism and magazine sequences come in and talk to us about what students should expect once they get into their sequence. Since I’m going to be in the Strategic Communication sequence, and  will not be taking any classes from those majors (except maybe one or two from the photojournalism one, because the professor said the classes J4556: Fundamentals of Photojournalism and J4568: History of Photojournalism was open to similar majors, and if I’m allowed to take it – I think I just might, because it sounds interesting.) But, I did learn a lot about each of three majors.

For the Convergence Journalism major I learned that students basically learned the combined skills of Print & Digital and Broadcast majors and are really creating news stories that are of the same media platforms we are using in J2150 right now. They also work freelance for KOMU, KBIA and the Missourian with alternating shifts throughout a semester. Convergence Journalism student’s put in a lot of time working on their multimedia stories, which from this student’s example about the Columbia’s Room At The Inn program, turns out to be in their favor.

For the photojournalism major, students learn not only how to tell stories through photography, but through audio and video as well. Although I personally have a passion for photography, I never really considered pursuing the photojournalism path because I have a very equal passion for writing and words as well, and found a happy medium for that within Strategic Communication. But nonetheless, I still believe that photojournalism is an important area of journalism and find the work that photojournalists put out to be extremely cool and worth all the work they put into it. And as I said earlier (if I’m allowed to) I’m interested in taking the two photojournalism classes that are open to similar journalism majors, because even though I don’t want to pursue a career in photojournalism, I’d still love to learn a little bit about it in a classroom setting.

Thirdly, before the magazine presentation, I hadn’t realized how many specific majors there were within the magazine sequence (design, editing, writing, publishing & management and arts & culture journalism). I flirted with the idea of being a magazine major for awhile, but most magazine majors of all spectrums are generally strong reporters and I have never really liked reporting that much. Besides that, I’ve always been a fan of Vox magazine, which is mostly student produced and a part of the Missourian. 

Overall, listening to the three different professors in these three majors that I’m not majoring in speak was interesting because it just reinforced my happiness with the major that I ended up choosing and will start taking classes in in the fall. 

How To Take The Best Picture Ever

This week during lecture, Professor Rice talked about the picture/video hierarchy and how the elements intimacy, emotion and picture quality work in correlation with the 5 W’s (who, what, where, when and why) along with how to work with light, composition and the rule of thirds.

Over the summer, I worked at a summer church camp in southeast Missouri called Blue Mountain Camp (the picture I’m about to talk about made the website’s background!). During my duration as a staff person at the camp, I performed many duties along with my fellow staff members. We cooked, cleaned, did ground work, performed songs and danced and led worship. But for me specifically, I held another position as the camp’s unofficial photographer. I would go around during each week of camp and take pictures with the site director’s (AKA my boss’) camera and try to really capture each moment as creatively, effectively and beautifully as I could. Even though I had an interest in photography before my job last summer, getting the chance to really do photography work was a great experience for me.

 

Although I have a lot of favorite photos from last summer, this particular photo is my absolute favorite for many reasons.

This photo is one of my favorite photos because I believe it includes all the elements that Professor Rice talked about during his lecture. It is intimate because you got to see young people be there for a friend and need in pray with him when he really needed it. It evokes emotion due to the lighting of the picture (the time of day was around early evening, right before sunset) and the way the people in the photo are positioned.

The picture quality obviously includes the light element, as this picture has not been tampered with in photoshop at all. The rule of thirds is in play here too with the teenagers in one side and the cross in another. If I had chosen a different angle, the picture’s emotional and overall quality would totally be different and the intimacy of the photo would not be the same. If I had gotten closer to the group, the photo would have been obviously even more intimate, but I really wanted to get the cross in the picture too as I felt it completed the whole story behind the photo and everything that I was (unknowingly, at the time) trying to go for: emotion, intimacy and the picture quality.