Anyone out there who reads this blog
will know that I both break promises and am terrible at blogging. The post on the two local filmmakers never
got put up because after my interview with them they invited me to come onto
one of their shoots and get some behind the scenes footage for my piece. Since then we have not been able to work out
a time we can all get together and make this happen. I’ll keep working on it though so look for a
post on this in the near future.
In the meantime I’m posting an
assignment for my Journalism 111 class, the first part of a series on a news organization
and their switch to multimedia reporting.
This interview was with a young student from WSUV. She’s also an old friend of mine, and really
it was just a treat for me to sit down and talk to the gorgeous Teresa
Lane. Be sure to check out her blog
linked at the end!
April 27th, 2012
I met up with Teresa Lane by the coffee
machines in the new downtown library. She greeted me with her usual, “hey what’s up?”
as she sat totally comfortable and relaxed.
After snapping batteries into my audio recorder and letting her know
that she should feel free to interject with interviewing tips, we began talking
about multimedia journalism.
Robbin
Goss: Alright, this is
Teresa Lane.
Teresa
Lane: Hello.
R.G. Hello.
Um ok Teresa so we’re going to be talking about multimedia journalism
and I hear that you work for the VanCouger newspaper and WSU Vancouver.
T.L. Yes.
R.G. What is your position at the VanCouger?
T.L. I’m a reporter at the VanCouger. I’ve been working there since January. Mostly I just, you know, every edition of the
VanCouger I try and put in 2 articles.
R.G. At the VanCouger, how have you seen, or have
you seen at all, any kind of a switch from printed news to a multimedia
grounding?
T.L. The VanCouger itself hasn’t really done
that. We don’t have a website yet.
R.G. In how you have used multimedia in your
journalism, what do you see as some advantages and then some disadvantages of
using that?
T.L. Well one of the articles that I wrote was
about disability services at WSUV and I think, you know, one of the things is
that it’s really beneficial to be able to take pictures of things and to
videotape things because it allows people that maybe can’t read or don’t have
as good of vision or that kind of thing to also experience whatever you’re
reporting about. There’s that - of
course there’s that aspect of being able to describe something entirely without
words which is also nice. I mean you don’t
really wanna read an article that’s all description. You wanna know the facts. But when you see a picture you’re like, “Ok
that was what the event looked like,” and that is cool.
R.G. What do you think the future of new reporting
and journalism is going to look like?
T.L. In my COM101 class, we talked about mobile
applications a lot. And I think that,
you know, and more these days people want to, even instead of computers or just
the internet on the computer, they wanna be able to have an application on
their phone that says, “Tell me the news,” and then, “Oh well this happened
today,” and, “oh isn’t that sad.”
One of the things someone said in my
class was that, “Instead of looking for the news, the news finds you that way.” I think that that’s really powerful. And in some ways, it’s also kind of scary
because we’re being told what to think rather than going out and trying to find
things that we want.
 |
| We walked down to The Academy to take a couple pictures. |
T.L. Being part of a newspaper, I think it’s
really powerful to be able to appeal to your audience definitely. And I think that if we had an online website
that we would be able to access more readers and access maybe the people that
don’t want to pick up a newspaper every day or someone like that. I think that being found by your reader is
not necessarily the way people are going about things any more.
Teresa’s blog: wherethingsbegin.wordpress.com
Thanks everyone for reading and till
next time, Valete! (Latin)
Your decision to interview another student journalist is intriguing to me. I think it's a unique approach and it's useful to see the experience other students are having with the industry's transition.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty blown away that the VanCougar doesn't have a web site of its own. It seems pretty mystifying why it wouldn't even have something barebones. I suspect they're not trying to make a statement by not having one.
I'm also curious about your decision to include the straight transcript of your talk. Is there a reason you took that approach instead of synthesizing your discussion with Teresa?
Finally, you might want to ask her if she's comfortable having her email address out there publicly!
I was also pretty surprised that the VanCouger doesn't have a website. She did mention during the interview that the paper was talking about setting one up in the Fall though.
DeleteAs far as the straight transcript goes, I honestly thought that that's what we were supposed to do. It just hadn't crossed my mind to do anything else. I suppose I didn't think of writing it like an article because I'm not really comfortable with the "newspaper" style. First because I'm far out of practice, and secondly because I don't like that style of writing.
I read far more magazines than newspapers and I took this format for an interview straight from Rolling Stone.
Thanks for the tip on the email. That was just me misreading my notes.
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