Journalism Reflection

Eric Chen, Oct. 12, L&L Marcum 8B

Start date: Aug 22

End date: Oct 11

        In this unit, I’ve annotated many news articles to help me understand the structure and the writing style inside a news article, written a true news article using these techniques, and finally, made a real digital newspaper as the summative! You can find my summative documents here. The process that I went through throughout the unit answers the SOI: “News stories can be communicated for multiple purposes with a specific style for journalism.” With those annotations, I learned that news stories can have multiple purposes, according to the contents and style of writing. With writing an actual news article and publishes it to the web, it fulfilled the key concept of this unit: which is communication. The related of style can be fulfilled by annotating different kinds of news articles.

        The unit question is “How can I take something that happens everyday and create a news story?” That’s what I did when I did my summative, which was making a real newspaper. First, I collected ideas from inside and outside KAS. Second, I decided on a specific topic that I want to talk about in my article: Flex Time and A-G Rotation at KAS. Lastly, by using the writing process, write and proofread my article. The final article is then being input into the group newspaper.

        While my groupmates (Anthony, Quinton, Hiram, Sean) and I were working on our newspaper on Pages, there were many problems. First, Hiram, Quinton, and Anthony didn’t get their Apple ID for the first time (Sean was good, and Anthony got it the second time. I’ve helped Quinton by creating another account using his KAS email, but Hiram told me that his Apple ID has been hacked. Luckily, Hiram got his Apple ID back soon afterwards, so all went successful), and there were many formatting issues with our newspaper. (Thanks to Anthony, the newspaper looks nice and well-organized.) But we all eventually got rid of the problem, and that’s why our newspaper looks nice and well-organized. It had been such a hard work to get this done!

I’ve done a great work on this unit, and I hope I can achieve high levels in all criterias (B, C, and D). Those ATLs, which includes creative thinking and communications skills, were fulfilled with the creation of the great “Marcum Paper,” which is our newspaper. Detailed ATLs include creating my own works and ideas (writing process fulfills this), writing articles in different purposes (our newspaper fulfills this), giving and receiving meaningful feedbacks (peer editings fulfills this), and brainstorming ideas and inquiries (I’ve done this before I wrote the first draft).  

In summary, I think I’ve done a great job in this unit, and it’s very fun. I can do that for the whole year!