What have we learned? A conclusion to New Media and The Independent​ Voice

 

Galveston, Texas, 2016. Living near an ocean has helped me create a greater sense of the need for environmental awareness and information. Photo by: Savannah Mehrtens

 

This blog was created as the required writing assignment for my journalism class, new media and the independent voice. When I started this blog I really had no idea how it would come out or what I would learn along the way. As my final blog post for this class, I wanted to take the opportunity to look back on what I’ve learned by writing this blog, and what I hope viewers can take away too.

1. Learning to let loose (with writing): I learned that I can be more light-hearted when writing a blog than with traditional news. This may be to your surprise from reading this article, but it took a lot of effort for me to break out of the protective shell of traditional reporting and put a little of myself into my writing. After beating it into my own head after so long, this class was a nice break from that traditional form. I still write in detail to the best of my ability (sourcing from online news, for the most part, can make that challenging). At least I learned to add hyperlinks instead of a URL sheet at the bottom of my page, like in my first few posts.
2. Bias in media: When searching for stories, I realized that my social media is very biased. It is mostly liberal unless I seek out unbiased or right-leaning news sources. This became even more apparent to me when we studied blogs that were right and left-leaning in class. I mostly take my story ideas from my own interests or reading the science section of the New York Times, but there were moments where social media played a role in my blog posts, such as my post on drilling.
3. Breaking news in social media: Although social media can be biased at times, I stumbled across a video on a stranger’s twitter page out of complete luck (or algorithm). For the most part, I tried to stick to news pertaining to the U.S. to avoid being too broad in my topics of environmental issues and politics. There was an exception made when a 7.5 magnitude earthquake and an 18-foot tsunami wave hit the providence of Central Sulawesi in Indonesia and Palu. When I wrote the blog the death toll was already at 800 people. This to me was proof that social media can be of assistance in reporting or getting news out.
4. Opinions on national events: My anger can make a harsh opinion article, but like using the energy of anger for running exercises, it will die out quickly if its the only method used for the matter at hand. I don’t have any significant opinion writing experience, but because this blog was partially politically based it didn’t feel right to leave Kavanaugh out of the picture during his hearing. When watching the 24-hour news cycle continuing to show Kavanaugh’s senate coverage and Trump’s responses I felt it was only appropriate to write an opinion article to connect the morals I was seeing to environmental deregulations and other issues of the Trump administration. This article steered me off the tracks of what was meant to be an objective blog, but I somewhat hopped back onto that path after this piece.
5. Keep it interesting: Science – unless presented by your choice of the fictional (but loveable) Ms. Frizzle from “The Magic School Bus”, Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Bill Nye the Science Guy – often can leave people, well, frizzled. Science is a broad topic, and my blog is even narrowed down to specifically the environment with a focus on climate change and energy to make things a bit easier on everyone. There is so much to learn on these topics and the issues concerning them that it simply doesn’t make sense at points, so I tried to find ways with this blog to make these topics seem a bit more friendly. Whether it be explaining a term used in a different blog, such as ocean acidification, or encouraging readers to get involved outside of the screen they are reading this blog site on, I hope I was able to make these topics ever so slightly less daunting.

 

This blog has been one of my favorite experiences writing for a class so far (although I rather enjoyed making a video about surfing for another class too). After this school semester, I plan to continue to write on this blog as often as I can, but it will be less frequent then what I create now. Hopefully you will keep reading my blog, and if I do my job right, take away something from it as well.