Media Participation Project

For my media participation project I wrote a story for Unwind! Magazine. It was really fun going to the meeting to listen to the story pitches and choose which story you wanted to write. Unwind! Assigns stories based on who raises their hands first during the meeting. This process is exhilarating and stressful at the same time, if you see the story you want you have to shoot your hand up and make it clear that that story is yours. When I was listening to the pitches by topic I found them all to be interesting, but I was holding out for the music section because I wanted to see if music-journalism is the career for me. When the time came I shot my hand up in the most passive aggressive way I could and snagged a story on holiday music.

My assignment was somewhat vague but it revolved around holiday music: the good, the bad, and the ugly. I took this direction and moved it towards discussing how holiday music today can be rather provocative and sometimes miss the bar for family themes and holiday spirit. I thought that this assignment was really fun, I loved talking about music with the people I interviewed and it was cool to see what their thoughts were on something that I’m so passionate about. I am a little nervous to know what my editor thinks since I took it in a more extreme direction; but I’m definitely going to write again for Unwind! I really enjoyed writing my first “music-journalism” piece and I want to continue writing different music related pieces because it combines my two passions: writing, and talking about music.

I also decided to make a short holiday playlist myself as an extra without knowing if it’d be used as part of the story. My editor told me that she liked the playlist idea and said she would create the playlist on either Spotify or 8Tracks and add a link to the online edition!