I hate to dissappoint my News and New Media professor and TA (sorry, no embarassing story he wrote), but I have a dirty little secret: I’m not a journalism major.
I’ve had to act like I was for the last few weeks, though.
I weaseled my way into News and New Media, which is a class in the prestigious Medill School of Journalism, a place where many of my friends have spent the last four years of their lives learning the ins and outs of real journalism, like how to beg for a job, how to kiss ass (or any other portion of your supervisor necessary), and occasionally, how to write a moderately accurate article.
I took the class because I decided I needed a better theoretical foundation in web design, and the only other major class offered in web design that I knew of and hadn’t already taken was more geared towards back-end databasing and coding in JSP.
Which I was not about to do.
I figured it would be easy and useful, which it was, right up until the very end. You have a final project, which is to create a website from scratch, and do all original reporting. I knew about this requirement when I signed up for the class, but I also knew that it was traditionally done in pairs or groups of three.
I figured I’d find a Medilldo who didn’t know a damn thing about web design (and didn’t care to) to write all the articles and I’d just copy/paste them into a snazzy little site. This quarter, however, there were no groups of three, so the odd man out got to do a solo site.
Guess who the odd man out was.
It wasn’t horribly difficult until I had to write the final story, which of course I procrastinated terribly on, because I had absolutely no desire to face up to my pseudo-journalistic destiny. Then, I realized, oh shit, this is due tomorrow, and I have interviewed…no one!
Ok, I had interviewed one person, but…no one! sounds much more dramatic.
I frantically sent out emails to a bunch of musicians I know, and called several people in an attempt to at least get something coherent down on…well, not paper, but you get the idea. And I’d like to publicly thank Aaron Childs, Laura McLean, and Sarah Pinsker for pulling my ass out of the fire and giving me great quotes.
Anyway, the finished product of the final website is now up on my Northwestern web space, so please let me know what you think.
Oh, and if you catch any glaring errors, please let me know sooner.