Goodbye and Good Riddance

 

The end of the college year is finally among us. Even though I am happily moving out into a house, it still saddens to say goodbye to the college, the place I called home. I will miss drunken chats with the security guard, lining up for dinner and a stupidly early time (5pm) and procrastinating in numbers, justifying it as "Well if they're not studying, they're not getting any smarter either, so it's okay for me to do the same so we stay on the same level of smartness". Just that sentence proves that we should have studied. I will miss being surrounded by 200 of my closest friends and the countless inside jokes that have formed over my time here. The year has been amazing, something I will never forget. Never did I think that I would make friends as close as I did, and imaging my life without them now is like imaging Nimbin without drugs. It's not going to happen. So to conclude, before I post countless photos of some of my favourite times this year, I would just like to say thank you to everyone I have met this year. The experience changed me as a person for the better and I have a bigger support network than I could have ever imagined.

These are the girls that changed my life. 

All College Ball

My sister and my best friend came and joined to college life too!

These boys are like my brothers.

I'm going to stop there because there are literally thousands of photos I could put up.

Although I know I won't keep blogging, the fact that the blog is here means that I will always look back on it and remember that one semester I decided to shake up my electives and do journalism.

Also, here is my favourite quote to leave you with. Its from Winnie the Pooh

"If there is a day we can never be together, keep me in your heart and i'll stay there forever"

Money Money Money

Here is a tune to listen to while reading this blogpost to set the mood. Its also a classic and everyone should appreciate it.

So there have been many life changes that have happened within the last few weeks. They all came relatively quickly, but they are all for the best.

The first one is that I got a job. Woo! After a year of being an avid job hunter, I finally got a retail job with a great team of people. When I first went to the interview, I was worried because I had previous interviews that didn’t work out too well. I was always too nervous and couldn’t concentrate properly meaning my answers always seemed stupid and I was probably coming across as some bimbo. I decided to go into this with the thought that if it didn’t work out, I’ll just return to my home town for the summer and it’ll be okay. So all the pressure was off me in the interview. Maybe that’s why I performed so well? We can’t be sure.

Then I got a call a few days later saying I had got the job! It was quite a shock! I had no retail experience at all!

So then the complication hit: where was I going to live all summer? I got kicked out of my residential college in only a few weeks. Luckily some girls I was friends with were moving into a house, so I made the decision to move into a house with them, the second big life change that had happened to me in the last week. We signed a contract quickly and as painlessly as possible.

Therefore, I am now the proud tenant of a house AND I have a job. Bet I seem pretty independent, huh? I still need to learn to cook, but those skills will hopefully come later!

There is one thing that my head is still getting around though, and that is money. How quickly it comes. How quickly it goes. How the world revolves around it. Then the big ol’ debate arises: does money buy happiness? I work in a store where there are a lot of expensive things and people throw a lot of money around. I’ve notices that the people who come in with kids are usually the nicest people. Is this because they love seeing smiles on the kids’ faces when they buy them a game or an iPod? The younger generation is always up for a good chat too and aren’t shy when it comes to asking questions, does this mean they are just as happy too?

I have however noticed that middle ages people that come in by themselves without a ring on their finger (yes, I am a girl, I notice these things) are the impatient, rude, and generally unpleasant customers.

Here is my personal opinion on the debate: money does not buy happiness. Happiness is a state of mind that can’t be bought, and you get happiness by the amount of love in your life. To get this love, you need to give the same amount of love. If you give no love, you get no love.  Easy as the ABC. Hope that makes sense!

End of rant.

Laurens 21st-Trip Down Memory Lane

So this weekend was my sister's 21st birthday. I don't know if any of you are siblings but when one turns 21, it's a big thing. My sister is my best friend. You should know that my family struggle at public speaking. All 4 of us can't speak in front of an audience to save our lives.
Therefore I made this video to show everyone at the party. And I wanted to share it with you all! Yay!

We have about 50 people at our house for her party, with 40 of them staying the night. It was messy. Because I had to work the next day, I didn't drink (much) so I was on looking after the drunks duty. And believe me, that is not something you want to be.
But at least now at my 21st I can be the messy drunk one and she'll have to look after all my friends!
This may be a pointless blog, but at least you get an insight into my life!
Well a little bit anyway...

Solves Cases...Not A Cop - LectureTwelve

When I first heard the words ‘investigative journalism’, I automatically thought of the television show ‘Castle’. You know the one, where the main character is an author and he follows around a detective to get awesome stories. After the lecture I realised that I had no idea what was going on. Investigative journalism wasn’t about following around crime and putting yourself in dangerous situations to get awesome stories, it was about getting the correct facts for a story. It was about making sure the truth gets out there so the public knows what was going on.

The lecture demonstrated that there are three investigative methods that journalists use to check their story is right. Firstly there is interviewing. This is interviewing numerous on-record sources, as well as anonymous sources, to determine if all the information matches up and to hear different accounts of the same story. Secondly, there is observation. This involves investigating technical issues, the examination of government and business practices and what effect this has, as well as research into social and legal issues. Thirdly, analysing documents is vital for validating a story. Looking at law suits, legal documents, freedom of information material and so on usually present the clear hard facts without variation.

After investigating all of these, you then have to ask “Does what you were told, what you saw and what was recorded line up?”

Sure it’s no ‘Castle’ investigation, but hearing about this made me realise the significance of having to correct facts, and a combination of these methods would definitely improve the credibility of you as the author.

Why Is Your Story More Important Than Mine - Lecture Eleven

Like most things in this course, I hadn't heard of agenda setting before I stepped in to the lecture theatre on one faithful Monday afternoon. It was simply another aspect of journalism that I never thought about. To everyone out there like myself who doesn't know what agenda setting is, let me enlighten you. Agenda setting is when the media presents issues frequently to the audience that results in large numbers of the public perceiving those issues are more important that other ones. Within this, there are two assumptions of media agenda. Firstly, mass media don’t reflect and respect, they filter and shape it. Secondly, media concentrates on few issues and this leads to the public perceiving those issues as more important that the other issues.

Throughout the lecture I began to form a problem with agenda setting. I thought about the story that I had chosen to do for my annotated bibliography, a suicide from a nineteen year old girl who was a victim of bullying. Her story was publicised all over the news for weeks when it had happened, however there are many similar cases that don’t even get a mention in the newspapers. Does media agenda decide that person is not important? Or why is one case of this happening more important than the other? The news chooses an agenda when it hasn’t been publicised for a while. That way it is fresh, new and interesting to the reader, attracting their attention. However as soon as a similar event takes place, the news is not so quick to publish it because the audience may see it as ‘another suicide story’.

Fighting a Losing Battle - Lecture Nine

News values were the topic of this week’s lecture. What makes an article? What engages the audience? Why is it good enough to be in the public interest?

The main concepts I got from Bruce this week was the newsworthiness hypothesis. There are three hypothesis used that help people determine how worthy the news is and if it will attract the audience. They are:

1.       The additivity hypothesis. This states that more factors the news article satisfies, the higher probability it becomes news.

2.       Complementarity hypothesis. This states that factors tend to exclude each other.

3.       The exclusion hypothesis. This states that events that satisfy none or few factors will usually not become news.

To be honest, when I try and think of news that is engaging and draws me in, I can’t determine factors that make it interesting. What I read every day depends on how I’m feeling. If I need life advice, I’ll go to the horoscope. If I’m in a bad mood, I’ll look at the latest tragedies. If I’m in a good mood, I’ll look at celebrity gossip. I don’t know if I quite grasped the meaning of today’s lecture, but I came out pondering about how each person finds different pieces of information engaging and interesting. No one can really determine what is going to engage an audience, because some people are always going to be left out. For example, I really like rocks. Laugh all you want, but earthquakes, lava, volcanoes, and the types of rocks that they all form really interest me. However I rarely see articles about them in the paper.

What I am getting at here is, no matter how hard you try to please everyone and try and analyse what everyone is viewing, someone is always going to miss out. Determining if the news report will be read is hit and miss. People change what they want to read on a daily basis.

So good luck to everyone out there trying to make a people pleasing article. You just can’t win.

Today's picture shows a young boy fighting a losing battle. I thought I'd better explain it, just in case one of you didn't pick up on it and thought I was putting seedy pictures on here...

Am I Wrong For Doing What's Right? - Lecture Eight

Right or wrong. Ultimately, this is what the lecture was about. How do we know when something is right or wrong? Where is the line between ethical and unethical? To be completely honest, my thoughts in the lecture were not focused on our guest speaker, but rather I had a moral debate with myself to try and justify whether I thought made-up situations were unethical or not. I ran different scenarios in my head and tried to determine what I would do if I was in that dilemma. I sound crazy right? Wrong. Although it might be an odd tactic, it really did help me clarify my personal values and form the line in which I would begin to regret what I was doing.

Let me run you through one of the scenarios that I would establish in my head. I had a thought about what I would do in a situation where someone had leaked me information that had the potential to be a breaking news story. As in, big enough to make a career. To be my big break in the journalist world. However, this information would result in the dismissal of a person and possibly result in their inability to get future employment. Morally, I decided I could not do anything with the information. The source may pass it onto someone else; however I could never personally destroy someone’s livelihood. It would be against everything I stand for; every value that I was taught when I was raised would be compromised.

So would that make me a bad journalist then? I would be choosing not to publish information in the public interest. Sure there are other directions in journalism, but you will be forever faced with these ethical issues at one stage or another. Now I suppose I just have to figure out how to deal with them when they arise. And decide if I want to be in a field where my personal values are constantly negotiated.