Reflection

I found working on multi-format pieces of journalism to be a challenging, but rewarding and enriching experience. My first assessment which was the News Bulletin story was something rather familiar to me. I do volunteer and paid work at 2ser FM, a community radio station, where a large part of my job is compiling and reading radio news bulletins, so I sense I may have had an advantage. I perhaps didn’t take full advantage of my experience, as I forgot to include a sign off as well as any sport or weather, which I may have simply overlooked. In future I should ask more questions of my tutor to be sure of exactly what I need to set out to do. Our group assignments were a lot of fun. My partner Kathryn was a really great teammate to have, and I felt we really excelled as a team. Our first assignment we decided to take the political angle, as we felt it would be easier to get that out of the way and that it would be more timely to be writing about the Federal Election before it happened on May 18th. We decided to centre our package around the question of whether Australians cared more about refugees at the 2019 election than in previous ones. We did a lot of travelling for this one, and encountered some interesting challenges. Our first task was going out and filming at the Rally for Refugees in the CBD, where we got some great footage. Unfortunately, our mic extension played up and we had a bunch of muted footage. This was a setback that we had to deal with, and I think it strengthened our resolve. We travelled out to Penrith to speak with a Greens candidate for the Federal seat of Lindsay, which we thought would bring currency to our story as the seat was once of the key seats heading into the election. For me personally this was a challenge as I live close to the city, so getting up early and heading out west was a challenge. We worked well and we achieved a solid result for this first package, and we were both quite satisfied with the outcome. We knew the areas we needed to work on for the second package. For that one, we came up with the idea of covering the Lakemba Nights Ramadan markets. We did really well in shooting all our footage in one night, and we got a heap of great interviews. It can definitely be intimidating to go up and ask stall owners, but we put that aside and got a night of work we were proud of. In terms of the package itself, we were both really happy with it. I think we addressed the issues that Margot had raised with our first package, to bring a much improved product. I think it captured the fun, inclusive nature of the event, and we were both really satisfied with it.  In terms of the blogging side of things, I definitely feel I need to improve. I am not an especially tech-savvy person, but I can’t use this as an excuse and need to figure out ways to get better at particularly the aesthetics of my blog site. I feel if i can address this, I will do better in future in professional and academic capacities.

Nick Parmeter