The new Journalist! - being a 'real' journalist

It was a great experience to have Steve Molk as a lecture for the last lecture. One thing I really liked about the lecture was that he spoke about the real life situation with his own personal experience. After learning about all the basic theories of journalism it was much easier to apply and understand the real life situations of Steve.

One thing that really hit me was how he said, “You have to start now.” I personally always had a thought of working in any industry after I graduate my degree and when I have knowledge about the certain job. Steve, however, emphasised on the fact that building experience is also important and that we have to use our opportunities around us. In this case he talked about blogs, twitter, and online news industries such as fairfax media etc.

Steve focused on social media platform especially, twitter. Twitter is a source where information spreads rapidly to many people around the world. He said that it was loved by many of the journalists due to these characteristics and that we should also be effectively using these types of platforms contact with other experts in the field.

He said during the lecture that it was nothing, and that he was not going to change the world with his radio spots, implying the fact that it is easy to start and encouraging us, as students of journalism, to begin building our experience for our future career. By this I realised that I may have been thinking too much about the core aspects of journalists and was scared to start anything. As I posted on my blog about the lectures, I strongly believe that a journalist should be someone who changes the world. The major reason was because many people consume and are influenced by the media. For now, I don’t want to be a journalist writing news and so on. I want to be a producer for a radio channel. I might change my career throughout however; this is what I want to be. Therefore, I couldn’t perfectly apply myself in Steve’s lecture, but what he was saying and how he encouraged us throughout the lecture is long lasting.

Through this lecture I learnt how the theories discussed throughout the semester can effectively apply in real life and what I should be doing in order to be successful in my career. Steve implied that blogging can be a great help to build experience. When we started blogging to be ‘the journalist’ our selves, I didn’t understand how it was relevant in becoming a journalist. I just thought it was a practice of writing my thoughts and facts. It was, however, clear in this lecture that blogging helps us to build experience and that it can be used in the actual work force. Through the JOUR1111 I have learnt many aspects of Journalism, both good and bad, and I have come to understand ‘journalism’ and ‘journalist’ better compared to the start.