Media Participation Project

For my media participation project I initially ran into a lot of trouble trying to set up meetings or attend assignment meetings for several of the publications on campus. I ended up pitching a story to Her Magazine and Unwind Magazine, but unfortunately the idea had already been taken for Unwind and the people at Her Magazine never got back to me. With little time left to do the project I ended up emailing the Editor in Chief of the Diamondback and asking for some assistance. Luckily he set me up with one of his editors, Jenny Hottle, and I was able to spend some time in the Diamondback newsroom to see how the whole editing and layout process worked.
I had never been to the Diamondback newsroom before, let alone any newsroom, so just seeing what it looked like and how everyone was working was pretty interesting in and of itself. There were four copy editors, one managing editor, a page layout editor, a photo editor, and the two main editors. Every story that is written for the Diamondback has to go through each of these people before it goes to print. In the final layout stage of the publication four people read over everything once again to ensure that there are no mistakes.
While I was there Jenny was writing and editing a story about the Barking Dog closing in College Park. She was telling me that as a writer sometimes you will not get the information you want to hear, so you have to be crafty in how you phrase something or go about obtaining the information. In the case of her story, the manager of the Barking Dog refused to comment on why or even if they were closing the establishment down. In order to publish the story Jenny needed to be sure that they were in fact closing, so she called the Barking Dog at a different location and asked for the hours of the College Park Barking Dog, to which the person on the phone replied "uhh, the College Park location is closed." This was all the information she needed to complete her story, and now it is expected to go to print relatively soon.
Just from spending some time in the Diamondback newsroom and talking to Jenny and some of the other editors I learned some valuable information about journalism. The first thing was how the entire process of printing a newspaper works from start to finish. I did not realize how many components went into printing just one issue of a newspaper. The second thing was how to be a good journalist by not publishing false or misleading information. It is essential to wait for the correct information or be sly in how you obtain the correct information in order to maintain the integrity of the publication and yourself. Overall I really enjoyed being around some of the journalists and editors here on campus and listening to and reading over their stories and their take on certain issues. It was a great learning experience and I hope to go back again and maybe even pitch a story sometime.