Week 1 | 31st July, 2019 | Orientation
This week, we had our elective orientation. I was given the chance to opt an elective from several different ones in the orientation. I specifically chose journalism as an elective because self-expression is a vital part of not only my artistic journey, but my life itself. I’ve always appealed to self-expression and writing about my art, even as a young girl and am looking forward to being introduced to journalism and several other components that come along with it.
Week 2 | August 7th, 2019 | Radhika Seth
In the first Introduction to Journalism class we went over everybody’s choices when it comes to interviewing a celebrity in the fashion world. I spoke about one of my favourite shoe and accessory designers, Sophia Webster. She invented the “Chiara” shoe design shown below among other unique shoe styles. I chose to research her as homework and look into how she creates her shoe designs and the processes she goes through to market her product throughout various social media platforms and magazines. Below is one of her many “Chiara” designs:
After talking about our respective fashion celebrities, moved on to a more interactive activity which involved getting into groups to create a fashion magazine or magazine. Our fashion blog/magazine is supposed to have a name, logo, branding, roles (editor, writer, photographers, etc). I took the role of being the writer and the photographer. I have always been a voracious reader and writer and found the writing activity quite intriguing, same goes with photography. We discussed our roles, and shared our ideas about our magazines and fashion styles to include in them.
Week 3 | Radhika Seth
In our third elective class, I learned how to stop pay attention and listen to instructions. It is significant as an artist and a writer to follow instructions in order to comprehend what is going on around us. Without following certain instructions, we may lose focus or track of what is actually going on around us which might derail us into a series of mishaps. We performed an activity which instructed us to read 17 instructions first. As an avid reader and patient person, I read all the way through till the end and manage to understand the goal of the exercise: to pay attention and not be carried away and listen to instructions.
After this energising exercise, we were shown 7 ways in which information can be newsworthy:
- Impact
- timeliness
- human interest
- proximity
- the bizzare
- conflict
- and celebrity
These key elemetns taught me how to become a better, more efficient writer. To only include parts which are important when writing and not reporting certain unimportant details that might bore the audience.
Week 4 | Radhika Seth
In our fourth week of our elective class, I learned of an interesting term: SCOOP. I had read several scoops in my life before, but I had never realised that there was a name for it. I learned that in journalism a SCOOP is ” is an item of news reported by one journalist or news organization before others, and of exceptional originality, importance, surprise, excitement, or secrecy.” It is short, concise, brief and gets to the point, engaging the reader immediately.
When I got to write this a scoop, I explored ways in which I can use the same language as journalists and really broadened my perspective on journalism as a scoop, despite its brief length still has to be informative. At first, this was hard to do, but then later on, as I kept writing, I was able to comprehend how to express myself in similar terms.
Week 5 | Radhika Seth
Today’s lesson taught me how to be a more confident person and how crucial it is especially for a journalist to be confident when talking to people. The activity we did in the very beginning of the class (trust fall) taught be how to not only be confident, but be confident in other people by trusting them. A major part of becoming a journalist is being confident in who you are and portraying yourself to the world in a fearless way. You have to be quick, witty and smart. As a journalist, you have to indirectly be in control of the interview, never give the interviewee the control but still make them feel comfortable enough to carry on with the interview.
In order to gauge a better understanding of this, we watched on of the videos in which our professor was interviewing people in Singapore for the Red Dot awards. I learned how important it is to be confident when interviewing people, that your confidence that radiate a comfortable aura between you and the person you are talking to.
Week 6 | Radhika Seth
With our knowledge about everything we had learned in our journalism class, it was time to use that knowledge to create our own journalism article interview. I chose to use Stella McCartney as a subject. At first, it was overwhelming to write an article, but as I kept writing I found it easier to mould myself into a journalist’s voice, because I love writing and talking to people so much.
Here is the link to my final article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e_QVowlPBk5Wv44o8w3ZjWZZNbfYzpqcI5Ad1Q3Azjw/edit
Week 7 | Radhika Seth
In this class, we talked more about our next project: creating our fashion magazine. We had to do more hands on work in this class. I learned about team work, taking control over my tasks and communication. As we assigned our roles (reviewer, editor, rehash, etc) to each other, we discussed our magazine designs and worked more on elaborating our ideas. Communication was a key element that I learned in this class, it was important for our group to communicate despite misunderstandings and confusions.
Week 8 | Radhika Seth
As we dove into our magazine making project, we decided upon coming up with a central celebrity theme, like all magazines have. The celebrity we chose was Taylor Swift. I decided to work on writing an article on her latest album and her career so far, as well as coming up with a look book that shows all of her styles and looks in the past era. I also decided to create an ad, promoting her latest album, Lover.
I decided to go ahead with my look book, encompassing the theme of shoes and rings that Swift has worn this past year. It showcases the brand and the prize as well as a picture of her wearing it. I decided to focus on accessories rather than just clothing to make the magazine as diverse and interesting as possible.
This topic was really fun to do as it not only improved my journalism and magazine making skills, but allow made me more adept at using photoshop.
Week 9 | Radhika Seth
This class was dedicated to bringing everything we worked on together and formatting our magazine. I brought my finished Taylor Swift article. I found this article quite easy to make, because not only do I love to write, but also because Swift is one of my favourite artists. Writing about her came naturally. I created a cover page for her article called “The Timeless Star” referencing her rise to stardom at a very young age and her never-ending and successful career. I wrote an article about her most recent accomplishment – winning the Artist of the Decade award at the AMAs.
While writing this article, I learned a lot about how to format it even as I was writing. I realised that every article needs a hook to seize the audience’s attention, an introduction, a body and a concluding line to wrap it all up.
Week 10 | Radhika Seth
In our tenth week of our Journalism class, we wrapped our final finishing touches to our magazine and formatted it correctly to show our first draft. I learned a lot in these three weeks. The different writing styles i magazines and websites, like scoops, interviews, articles and reviews. I learned about how these elements come together in different ways to make a whole magazine. I also learned different aspects that make each writing style unique. For example, scoops are small and brief, interviews have questions and answers mainly asked by a journalist, an article has introductions, hooks, body with a lot of information, and a concluding line or paragraph to end it on a good note. Taking this course was really educative and informative, and I will carry the skills I learned in the past weeks with me to use in the future as a writer.
An advertisement I made about Taylor’s Lover album:
🧿AYUSHI MODI 🧿 