Week 6 Blog

 We have just finished out week 6 of our journalism course and I am very excited about it! I feel as if we are really pushing through this semester, and really pushing ourselves and seeing how much work we are able to handle under such a short period of time. I personally have had to dedicate a lot of my time to this course to make sure I stay on track with due dates and am producing quality work. I do feel as if I am growing a lot in this class and am surprised as well as proud of myself for being disciplined and dedicated to learning and growing in this course. I hope my peers are doing well and are learning, expanding, and enjoying this semester in all of their classes.

I felt like the reading topic for this week was very important and relevant in the world we live in. It is extremely important to be respectful, mindful, and politically correct when interacting with and talking to others, and even more important to do this when writing stories in journalism where the information will be shared with a lot of people. I really appreciated the reading “Reducing Bias in Language” and the forum discussion that I had with my classmates. It is very refreshing to have this sense of understanding and respect for different types of people being taught in many different classes and in different ways. I also thought it was great that there was discussion of how to address different groups of people, what is and isn’t appropriate to say, how to refer to different people, and how to be respectful when educating and writing in general. It made me very happy to see this lesson as a part of our coursework in class this semester.

Another aspect of this week in this specific course that I really enjoyed was this week’s news analysis assignment. I had a lot of fun being able to look through different videos and see what would work best for the assignment, answering the questions, and ultimately finding a video that worked alongside my beat in general. After watching the video, I ended up choosing to go with a video that I found of a news story covered by PBS on an art show. I chose this video and this topic because I also am covering an art show for my upcoming video report assignment, which I am also excited to discuss. The PBS channel covered a story on the interactive and immersive Vincent Van Gogh art show, with this specific show happening in Seattle, Washington. I was really excited to find this video and do the news analysis assignment on it for many reasons. The first reason is because I love art, art galleries, and as cliche as it may sound, I love Vincent Van Gogh and find his life story to be so fascinating. I also was excited to watch the video and answer questions on it because I actually had attended one of the sessions for the Van Gogh immersive experience in Seattle. I had recently went back to Seattle, Washington to visit my family for the holidays after not seeing them and the city for over a year just this past December for about a week. My mom ended up mentioning to me that there was a really cool art exhibit going on and sent me the link to it, saying I should check it out. This exhibit ended up being the Van Gogh Immersive Experience! I am so happy that I went, and truly had an amazing time. I left the exhibit feeling very emotionally moved and inspired. I thought that it was very interesting to see how the PBS channel covered the art exhibit, versus what I had experienced myself going to it. It also was very interesting to hear different takes on the exhibit from the curator himself, an art history professor from the University of Washington, and other people who attended the gallery. Altogether, it was an amazing and beautiful experience. I hope that there are more immersive art galleries like this in the future. I really do believe that immersive experience galleries are the future of the art world and am very excited to see the art world grow and develop. Below this paragraph is one of the many pictures that I took while attending the Van Gogh Immersive Experience in Seattle, Washington.

I also attended the PAU gallery this past Friday to take videos and photos for my upcoming video report assignment. I don’t want to give too much away or use too much material here that I will be using for my assignment, but the gallery was beautiful and I am excited to put my video together. Below this paragraph is a picture I took of the artist’s work at the gallery. More to come soon!