Intro to Journalism provides an in-depth introduction into the world of journalism and what it takes to be one. We learned about the key principles of journalism, while viewing the process of news creation and circulation extensively across multiple forms of media such as print, online sites, and broadcast. It aims to familiarize those who take this course with the practices of journalism such as creating headlines, defining certain elements of the news, reporting strategies, and writing styles that all play a large role in the strength of covering a wide range of topics such as daily incidents, monumental stories, or politics. The course also incorporates a hands-on learning experience since we had to actively create multimedia projects by conducting interviews and taking photos and audio recordings for the final project. Through this course, we gain the understanding of the complexities of the media and its production while acknowledging the impact that journalism has in shaping public discourse.
This course helped me find my journalistic voice. It was my first method of insight about the relationship between media and politics and how it can be a tool of empowerment or destruction. By creating headlines and learning how to prioritize the most important information to be at the forefront of the article. I learned that bias or misinformation could also be a result of the wrong choice of words, so from this course, I knew the value and weight of words and how careful we have to be. This sentiment is also expressed in the media’s representation of female political participants who often face biased, sexist, or objectifying coverage. This can allude to the article’s emphasis on gender roles, perpetuation of negative stereotypes, or focus on appearance, contributing to the misrepresentation or underrepresentation of female politicians. This can demotivate women themselves from participating in politics and the public and political parties in voting for them or taking them seriously, and the link between the media’s discriminatory representation and scarcity of female political participants depicts it. Hence, the knowledge of how to phrase headlines and articles while knowing the importance of what story requires to be told presents a call for a just and unbiased media portrayal of women in politics to counter the negative effects of the media and empower them at the same time, which this course helped me in not only comprehension but also application. These insights highlight the dual role of media as both a method of empowering women and also an obstacle in achieving equality.
