Open Up To New Possibilites!

          “As weeks go by in this internship, the work will become more challenging,” said Ms. Reid, when we first arrived to New York.  Ms. Reid securely stood on her word because every week I’m learning a new outlet of mass media and testing my skills to perform to the best of my ability.

         This week we’ve been educating ourselves on how to news stories, broadcast style. My first reaction was, “Oh this should be easy because it’s less writing from print.” Well, I was wrong because I’ve been stumped on trying to gather the necessary information and compiling it in a short, sweet, newscast. With broadcast, a journalist has less time, roughly 60 sec per story to report a segment. The difficult part is making sure there are enough details and remembering to write in active tense. While reading a print article and translating it to broadcast, it’s important to remember to make it more conversational. There is major difference when writing print style, there are more details, adjectives and very wordy. You have more time in print to set the scene and make the piece more colorful.

         Mastering broadcast comes overtime, so what a better way to get advice than from NBC’s, Emmy Award-winning Journalist, Mara Schiavocampo. Schiavocampo is a correspondent reporter for the Today Show, Nightly News, MSNBC and MSNBC.com.  Not only does she have that “it factor” for TV with her amazing beauty that lit up the room, but a warm personality to match. Everything about her just shined, inside and out. She shared her passion for journalism and mentioned her fist love will always be print, but discovered television was another infatuation in graduate school.  Majority of the Reid Group are have graduated undergrad or have embarked on our senior year at Clark Atlanta University and are still discovering what we want to do in our journalism career. Schiavocampo dealt with the same situation, and that’s why she went to graduate school where she landed many internships. She stressed the importance of obtaining internships referring to it as, “Free labor that equals opportunity to learn.” She has an impressive multicultural background, and has traveled all over the world to report compelling news stories. At the end of the session, she showed us actual footage of her reporting and its unbelievable how perfect she looked and sounded on camera. 

         Instantly, I became a fan and felt inspired to work twice as hard to chase my dreams. No matter what challenge comes way, I understand it will make me stronger and mold me to become the best journalist I can be.

✌ ❤☺-Demeshia Jackson