New beginnings for me

Is it just me or does new beginnings sound a little redundant? But it doesn't matter right now does it?

I have been MIA (Missing In Action) from the blogging scene lately mainly because no one is forcing me to blog anymore. I am officially out of campus and in the dreaded work place.

I am doing my internship with a motion picture company in South Africa. It Is quite a stretch from writing news articles all the time to focusing more on film but I have no doubt that I'll be able to do this and enjoy myself because that is what really matters.  

I never wanted to spend my six months doing something I would not enjoy, in the film industry I feel like I will enjoy myself more than I would anywhere else right now. So I am highly grateful to have gotten this opportunity.

But lets be honest here for a second, I only started working this week and I am very excited and all that but I haven't really settled in. I still feel a little out of place even though they have gone out of their way to make me feel comfortable.

I am just such an awkward human being. I must have hit my head a lot growing up.

Anyways I have been missing out so much on entertainment news and stuff which from now on I can not do being an official journalist and all. This weekend I am heading to The Playhouse, I'll fill you in on what happens there and my experience next week if I do not forget.

Lastly I keep giving myself mini goals to achieve; this month I just  want to mainly focus on myself and figuring out who I am because I need to find traits within myself that make me different from the next person. The industry is too big for me to go on being just a "young journalist." No way.  

Celebrating the talented youth

This last assignment had me looking for an accomplished person that has not been given media coverage by mass media.

I figured I would focus on someone younger because I myself am a young person and love knowing about fellow young people doing great things with their lives.

So I interviewed a young lady that I have known for a couple of years now, she is currently working as a quality control laboratory analyst. It sounds fancy to a simple minded girl like myself but she does not seem to think it's fancy at all.

What really made Luyanda Khambule stand out for me though is that even with her job she does radio on the side, during weekends which I think is amazing.

https://www.lesdokimos.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/jeunesser.jpg 

Her work ethic at such a young age is inspiring, she is chasing her dreams and has achieved more than most have at her age which she would rather be not revealed. She is young though I promise.

Doing the assignment was bittersweet because half of me was happy that I was finally done with all assignments needed for the course but on the other hand that made me sad because I would miss doing all the fun stuff I got to do with all the assignments I have done.  Coming to the realization that I am almost done with my journalism also causes some mixed emotions.

The challenges I faced with this one was again, time management but also I shot my video at night which meant I had to multitask with lighting and everything.

The Blesser phenomenon

My second to last new media assignment took me down a path I had never been down before.

It was so exciting to get the chance to choose my own topic because then I got the chance to play around with so many ideas. I eventually ended up choosing the blesser phenomenon which is growing quickly in South Africa.

One of the things I noticed when researching and asking people different questions was that using the term blesser to essentially refer to sugar daddies is something that some people have not heard before.

The phenomenon is mostly spoken about in the black community so maybe that is why some people have just not heard the term, but anyways a blesser is basically a glorified sugar daddy. They shower young girls with gifts in return for their company or sexual favours.

More girls are wanting to have blessers in their lives nowadays because they want to live lavishly and when I asked people for their comment they mostly thought the phenomenon had more to do with girls wanting to fit in more than anything else. I, for one, thought the problem was that girls perhaps cannot afford certain things, like travelling to Dubai, so they just decide to get themselves a blesser that can give them what they necessarily cannot get for themselves.

The topic is a growing one I feel it will be spoken about a lot in the years to come as the phenomenon spreads.

My lecturer made me question whether or not the phenomenon is going to lead to young girls falling victims of sexually transmitted diseases like HIV. I had not thought about it before she brought it up and I must say she may be right.

By doing this assignment I have gotten some insight on the phenomenon. I enjoyed doing it and faced little difficulties like trying to meet the deadline, as usual. 

An emotional experience

This news package made me a little emotional because the topic is one that is close to my heart.

Doing the package on the expensive breast cancer treatment was something I did not even plan to do, basically the report came to me while playing around online. I did not even know that organizations like Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and Doctors without borders existed. But now that I do I will be visiting their sites regularly to keep up with their work.

http://www.tac.org.za/sites/all/themes/sky/css/images/fresh/tac-logo.jpg

A part of me does wish that mainstream media could find the topic of expensive cancer treatment newsworthy and follow up on whether Herceptin/trastuzumab will be made cheaper. 

I feel strongly about this because my grandmother died from breast cancer which had ended up being bone cancer like in the case of Tobeka Daki who is mentioned in the report found on the TAC website under the topic: Activists demand Roche drops cost of vital breast cancer medicine. My granny was part of the public sector so she probably never even heard about the treatment.  

Doing the package was informative and difficult at the same time. I learned a lot about different non-profit organizations that try to make a difference in all our lives by speaking out. It is inspiring to learn about campaigns like the Fix the Patent Laws campaign which has members that go out of their way to bring awareness to issues like this one.

The assignment has taught me a lot and I am now informed about some of the issues that will not necessarily be covered in the seven o’clock news bulletins. I am grateful for non-profit organizations like Treatment Action Campaign which is where I first saw the story.

I did not face much difficulties doing research on this topic because it is something I am very interested in and will still be interested in years from now. Most people are also interested in the topic which means a change will eventually take place.

My thoughts on the online speech-based assignment

 

For my first news package in my third-year new media class, we had to do an assignment based on online speeches. 

The assignment was not meant to be difficult that much I got but the thing is that it had so many elements to it that needed loads of time and almost all my attention. The assignment would have been nothing but fun for me had I not had to do most of it during my one week Easter holiday.

All I wanted to do these holidays was chill and focus on trying to find an internship but instead, there was no time to relax. If I even tried to just spend a day curled up with a good book that I had been meaning to read for a month now I would literally feel guilty for neglecting my work.   

So instead of reading my book I read over the speech after spending two hours watching it. I paused it a few times just to make sure I was still awake, but the speech was nice. I really got to understanding it when I read it. I figured out what it was about and then got to writing the news article. 

Some of the challenges were taking a speech done in 2013 and trying to make it newsworthy now by choosing a new, fresh angle. Creating a poll was also a little challenging because figuring out a close ended question was not easy and also deciding where exactly I wanted to post my poll took some time. There was also a lot of stress over whether people would get involved in the poll or just ignore it and move on to more fun things especially because it was on Facebook which I never use.

The fun part came when everything was coming together and I got ready to email it to my lecturer. I always think I can do better on all my assignments so I had the same feeling two minutes before handing this one in but of course, I was out of time to make any changes.  

http://ircmentorcollaborative.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Time-Management-image.jpg

Assignments always carry the same lesson for me, which is that I cannot get through life doing things in the last minute. Time management was essential for this assignment to be done well, as it is with all other assignments. 

For the next news package, I plan to start very early so that I have enough time to do all the elements involved with it. Nothing will be done last minute so as to avoid any sloppiness, but to be honest I make the same promise to myself after every assignment. 

How I ended up in journalism

When the time came for me to choose a career path that I saw fit for me it was a very hard decision to make.

Instead of thinking about it throughout high school I was too busy stressing about boyfriends whose last names I cannot even remember now. I had three options in my mind though, it was either I became a medical student which I only liked because of Meredith Grey on Grey’s anatomy. Also I figured which parent would not like to have a doctor for a daughter?

My second option and my personal favourite was studying dramatic arts, I loved this also because I figured I could play a doctor in a television series (Grey’s anatomy.) I realised later though that it is not that easy to be an actress and I feared being stuck at home with no job after having gotten a diploma in dramatic arts. I am not much of a risk taker and neither is my mother who had to agree with the course I was going to take because after all she was going to pay for it.  

So I had to look at my third option, an option that I knew would be a win-win situation for me and my family. My last option was journalism, it became my option because if anything has been constant in my life, it has been my love for writing and a general interest in media. So becoming a journalist became my more realistic choice of study.

http://www.classiccarandbikeshow.co.za/data/files/media-copy.jpg

I knew that it would open up a lot of different doors for me, if ever I wanted to be a presenter it would be possible also I could acquire skills in photography, videography, radio, new media etc. with journalism alone I would get to do more and have fun which has always been more important to me than money, because let’s face it we have all heard that journalists do not get paid that much (whatever that means) and my first option of being a doctor would have led me to having a lot of money.

So cutting forward I ended up choosing journalism. I am now doing my last semester of the course, a choice that I think was the best one I could have made. I have fallen in love with the deadlines and constant interest in everything going on in the world. I am a better person and cannot wait for the rest of my life as a journalist to begin.

A quote I always keep in mind is that of Horace Greeley, “Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it.”