There is nothing like the smell of freshly sharpened pencils to get you in the mood for a good class. This week kicked off a new semester of classes and boy was I ready to get writing again. As of right now, it looks like this is going to be a great semester because not only do I adore a couple of my journalism classes, but the professors aren't half bad either. Here are some first class quotes from my professors that make me excited to be a journalist, and should make you excited too:
"You will learn to appreciate journalism as a service profession, one upon which individuals, communities and the country at large depend."
"Pictures are the primary mode of story telling in the modern media."
"Do not show a source you are weak. If they don't want to conduct an interview with you, tell them you will wait."
"You are going to learn to think like a reporter and read like an editor."
I hope that was inspiring. Now onto more important things... A few weeks ago I came across a fascinating article on ReadWriteWeb about a cool new way to research info on the Internet. Apture, a startup web company, allows readers to highlight a single word on the screen and search the Internet for information about that particular word without leaving the page. Crazy right? No, more like AMAZING.
So what does this mean for students like us? Well, for starters, if you don't know the definition of a word, you can just look it up with the click of a button. But if you are a journalist on deadline, and need to do some quick research on your source before you go out for an interview, this is a great time saving technique. Technologies like this are changing online news content and will continue to influence how we write for the web. Apture is the new link.
Check out this video with one of the creators of Apture. He describes how with the help of some journalists his multimedia tool became a hit.
