Critical reflection on the course

I believe that one of the best features of this course has been the overall course design, and so this critical reflection will focus on the course design in general and its component parts. The course allowed us to work as a team and learn by experience in the field, but instruction on how to improve our writing was not neglected.

I thought that the weekly meetings with the lecturers were a good way of holding us accountable to working on stories and thinking of new ideas consistently through the term. I enjoyed interacting with the lecturers on a personal basis, and appreciated their constructive criticism of my work. The meetings also provided a fixed time for our news agencies to meet, which was very necessary, especially towards the end of the term when people were busy with plenty of work on their other subjects as well as Journalism.

The idea of dividing us into news agencies with separate beats allowed us to explore a range of aspects of the university, and allowed good practice in teamwork, a very necessary skill for the workplace. The target of producing five articles each was realistic, and allowed us to put in time and effort to ensure that the articles were of excellent quality. I also enjoyed the way that we were encouraged to have our articles published: this provided added incentive to produce the best quality journalism we could, gave our reporting a purpose beyond simply earning marks, helped us to access sources who may have been less willing to contribute to articles that would not be published, and helped us build our portfolios of published work. This will aid in any job applications we make.

That said, I think that there were a few weaknesses in the course design. The placing of the due date for portfolios in the middle of the examination period was for our benefit, I know, since many people had not managed to finish their work by the end of the term, but it did mean that some people left considerable amounts of work until the examination period, which negatively affected their studying. Even those who tried their best to finish their work during the term would have to collaborate with their news agencies close to the deadline to compile the portfolios, which would have interrupted their examination preparations.

This deadline pressure was exacerbated by some confusion as to what contents the portfolio should have. I must admit that in my case, much of that confusion was caused by not reading the course outline meticulously at the beginning of the term and following it throughout the course, and by not always reading email attachments I was sent. However, I feel there was a lack of communication on the lecturers' part as well: the issue of exactly what to include in these critical reflections was not discussed in class, and the fact that we needed to write individual critical reflections for each article we wrote was not included in the course outline. Where there was communication in class about blogging and other matters relating to the portfolios, this was useful. I found that particularly Sim Kyazze's communication by email was good, but that emails should be sent to the class at least two hours in advance of the lecture they refer to. I realise that as journalists, we should be checking our email regularly, but during the term, not everyone has time to check their email before every writing and editing lecture to see if there has been an e-mail announcement about it.

I also felt that the process of allocating beats to news agencies should have been handled better. In a sense it was some agencies' own fault that they chose such narrow beats that they battled to find articles dealing with them and relating to Rhodes. But I felt the whole process would have been more fair if reasonable news beats were decided on by the lecturers and randomly allocated to us. This would also push us to report more on topics outside our individual fields of interest. However, this may have defeated the purpose of trying to get us to look at the nature of news beats, and what beats would be suitable for covering Rhodes.

Our news agency was very happy with our beat of academics and research, and found no shortage of good articles to write about it. However, I feel that we did not work as closely as a team as we should have. Group work can be extremely time-consuming, so towards the beginning of the term we developed the pattern of having as few meetings as possible, and instead passing work from one person to the other. I feel this was a sensible method of working together, since all of us are busy people and we can usually work more efficiently in a sort of assembly line than trying to complete every task together in meetings. However, this did mean that we were largely independent of each other when it came to investigating and writing articles. We shared story ideas and names of possible sources with each other in our weekly meetings with the lecturers, but then pursued, wrote and marketed stories on our own. We could also have done more to update each other about our progress using the blog. I feel we should probably have done more articles together as a team, rather than separately, and enjoyed the co-operation we had on the one article three of us have written together. At the beginning of term we made a decision that I would subedit all the articles produced by the news agency, but it proved impractical to do this before the deadlines set by our individual publishers, so I ended up subediting all the work after it had been published, for the final portfolio. This whole experience has shown me that for any journalistic work as a group, the group has to decide exactly how labour should be divided and define each person's role, and then stick to those decisions unless they prove impractical. Much communication is needed to ensure this happens.

In class, I felt the opportunities we were given to practice what we were learning during lectures in class assignments was also helpful, since learning writing techniques in theory can mean very little until one can put them into practice. In certain cases, such as the opinion-writing exercise, the deadline was very tight, but this helped to develop our experience, since deadlines in the real world aren't much better. I enjoyed the surprise news quizzes, since I keep up to date with the latest news and so generally do well at these things. I think that remaining aware of both local and international news is essential for any journalist. However, I thought the time spent on those computer-based logic and general knowledge quizzes at the beginning of the term would have been better spent on teaching, since we were never informed about their purpose. I would guess that they were an opportunity to assess some skills and see what areas lectures needed to focus on, but they were never referred to again in class.

I found the introductory news agency vision and mission-casting assignment very helpful. At the time we were asked to do it, I was not too happy with the idea, since I do not enjoy writing reflective reports, but in retrospect, the information we gathered in that process and the decisions we made were invaluable for our later newswriting. The mission statement had a great influence in the story ideas I chose to pursue: most were about explaining how research and academic developments at Rhodes are valuable to those in the broader Eastern Cape community. The introductory civic mapping question in that assignment also helped us decide which sources and avenues we were going to use to find story ideas. While one of these avenues did not prove very fruitful, others were extremely helpful. This reflects one important lesson I learnt this term: that good newswriting requires good homework, both before you even search for story ideas and then as you prepare interviews. I think the responses I received in interviewing sources were dramatically better than they could have been because I had taken some time to research topics and develop informed questions before I attended interviews.
The final civic mapping project, which we completed at the end of the term, was an engaging way of collecting the information about the community we had studied and rounding off the term's newswriting. I have been fascinated for a long time at the way communities and geographic factors interact to create a unique sense of place in different areas, and the civic map gave us some way to express that interaction on paper. In the end, we devised it as a sort of wall-chart guide to good sources at Rhodes, but I can see that one can develop civic mapping far further than that, to get better insights into how a community functions.

The blogging component of the course was a good opportunity to express our personal thoughts about the course and newswriting in general, and to communicate with our news agencies. I am sorry that I only grasped the whole purpose of personal and news agency blogging for the course rather late in the term, but I hope I made up for it by expressing some insights on my personal blog as I was learning them.

On a Media Studies level, though, I learnt that a blog is not an ideal means of communication for facilitating fast, active teamwork. The problem is that team members only see a blog when they choose to log on to it, and if they are forgetful and do not look at the blog regularly, they can miss important meetings and announcements. Another problem is that at times, important information was included in comments, which are not shown on the blog home page, and so can go unnoticed. The latest trend in new media is to ensure that instead of having to search for information on the Internet, consumers can make information come to them through RSS feeds or mailing lists. Perhaps we should have taken that approach and given all team members an email subscription to the team blog.

The last component of the course's work was, of course, critical reflections. For the most part, I find these reflections rather annoying and time-consuming, but I see their usefulness in bringing together all that we have learnt over the past term and getting us to think about how we can improve our news production. Being more self-reflexive is definitely a good thing; it helps to improve my work and prevents me from becoming arrogant. Through looking at each of the articles and writing critical reflections on them, I can see how my writing has improved through the term: my attribution is now more naturally integrated into the text, and I use fewer clumsy, long-winded sentences. These critical reflections, including this piece, have allowed me to put what I have learnt by experience this term into writing, and I hope I will refer back to these lessons and draw on them throughout my journalistic career.