Journ World

If you wanted to become a successful journalist, then you must learn how to love stress.

Coming from a Journalism Curriculum, I am already aware of how hard and stressful my life would be if I pursue my Journalism career. While most of our high school batch mates are enjoying their high school lives, we remain on the four corners of our room writing tons of articles and lay-outing newspapers. This is why I had second thoughts on whether i should enroll at UST to become a writer or enroll at PNU to become an educator. In the end, I had to follow my heart. It is a good thing that I already have some background on news writing which made it easier for me to catch up with the course.

My views on news writing and news reporting did change. During this course, I had realized how dangerous and life-taking my future profession would be. Although our school paper adviser before already told us that there are a lot of threats in becoming a journalist (like libel cases), I never realized that it would come to the point of death. I am now seeing our journalists as brave warriors but instead of holding a shield and blade, they are protecting and defending themselves with pen and paper.

Also with this course, I have realized how poorly treated our journalists are. Although we live in a democratic country, a lot of innocent media men are killed just because they are revealing the truth. In the media business, I doubt that every story we see on television or the newspaper is the truth. In our world today, the definition of the word truth is not definite.

With the requirement of this course of interviewing a journalist, I was able to fulfill my dream of meeting a true journalist. I was supposed to interview Ms. Kara David but she told me that her whole October and November was full and so, I had to find another one. After emailing and tweeting a lot of journalist non-stop, I was able to schedule an interview with Ms. Mariz Umali. And with this experience, I have observed how intelligent and proper Ms. Umali’s replies are.

Ms. Umali was able to describe her working place and the processes that happen behind the lenses. I have learned that there are a lot of editing and revising before a two-minute news report would be flashed. And so, it made me think again whether I have made the right choice of choosing this course.

A journalist merely gets enough sleep especially when he/she is a radio or TV journalist. I love to sleep and my mood would be grumpy throughout the day if I get less than 6-hours of sleep.

Knowing the “drill” made it easier for me to write articles. It is harder for me to contain all the things that I wanted to say in 500 words flat. This activity shows me that every word is counts.