This Semester in PoliCom

This semester has been a crazy collection of events. The political event that I have attended so far have been such a wonderful way to learn the ins and outs of political events. With all of this hands on learning so far, it has not only increased my interest in politics but also helped me develop my skills as a journalist.

One of the lessons I learned while going to political events and reporting on them, is that not everyone wants to be interviewed and not everyone should be interviewed. Being a journalist it is always hard to get credible sources and to find sources that are going to give the money quote. As a journalist the goal of any story is to report the story accurately but it is also important to have some heart and life in the story. Without the help of good quotes news stories would be extremely boring. While I was scouting out people at the Bernie Sanders rally at More House college, I came across a few people who gave very lackluster quotes. The truth of the matter is that some people really don’t want to talk and some people also get nervous when talking to strangers. While I had to weed through some of the not so great interviewees at the Sanders rally, I finally found some students willing to open up and give me the quotes needed to make a great news story. While I have interviewed many people before this was one of my first times going out and doing spontaneous interviewing, and it definitely taught me a valuable lesson about interviewing people.

Another lesson I learned while researching information for our content analysis project was that not everything is what It seems on online websites. While comparing two candidates it was easy to look at the surface of their website and make an assumption of what their entire pages would be like. At first I did just that and compared the two candidate based off of the initial look of their website. Once I went to the websites and dug a little deeper I found that there was more information to be seen and that the information on the outside front cover of the website was not all that there was to be seen.         

Overall I have learned a lot of information from these political events and learned many lessons. I cannot wait to see the rest of the lessons I learn from the remanding of the semester.