In this unit we learned about journalism, we annotated a lot of news articles, studied professionals and wrote our own Newsletter. It was quite an unit, many sleepless nights as well as a lot of stressful days.

Compare & Contrast 2 Similar News Stories

Similarities:

The similarities between these two articles, first of all, and the most obvious is that they are reporting on the same topic area, Hurricane Harvey drilling through Texas and various other states bring them destruction and an ungodly amount of rainfall. Both of these articles speak on the damages that were caused and how people are rescuing others after the storm. Both articles use pictures to show us a visual on how things are there and give us an idea how bad it actually is within the damaged area. A similarity on the tones of their voices is that they never use first person wording and doesn’t give out opinions, only factual information. The information is also organized fairly similarly with certain parts of information like context, backstory and a quick summary of damages are placed on top while rescuing attempts and quotes from people are placed towards the end of the article. As we can see there are many similarities from content, style to organization, it is fairly similar.

Differences:

Despite the many similarities, there are various differences in the 2 articles as well. First let’s start with content, content-wise they are connected rather than being the same. In my last paragraph, I said they had the same topic area because these are follow up events and they the second article would not have made sense if they didn’t touch on the topic in the first article. The first article is talking about the damages made by the hurricane itself, the second article is talking about the rainfall that flooded southeast Texas. Despite these being follow up events they focus on different parts of the same event.  Also, the second article gives more history than the first article touching on previous storms before this one.  On style, the second article does use much larger photos and a few more photos than the first article this is also an organizational area but it fits in the style as well. These differences are very close because despite it being very similar when we are being more specific it is a different topic. Still, it is true that they have many differences in the content, style/organization, which gives them their own relevance when readers are choosing which article to read.

Kami Export – Brian Hung – Texas Faces Massive Flooding-2ksqecl

Reflection:

This unit was about Journalism, we learned the style of communication that are used when writing news articles, we also learned why they communicated that way. Generally it is just a form of giving out facts in a nonbiased and doing so mostly straight to the point. Certain things I think I would like to reflect on are first of all the people I worked with, the final newsletter that we compiled and just a general summary of how I feel about the entire unit. It was definitely a learning experience in this unit, despite not being the typical fun class, we all enjoyed some parts of this unit I suppose.

First is the people I worked with, before moving on to the newsletter we compiled together let’s start with the people I did it with. Luca Thiel, Hayden Hsueh, Arham, Evan Chen and myself. Luca was undoubtedly the most serious worker with me, as the other 3 goofed off a bit, or a lot depending on the scale you are using. Hayden and Arham was like best buddies in this unit, since if they are goofing off, it would be together, since they have common interest in F1 Racing, Luca also shares the same interest but he had better disciplining. Evan is like the “I will do stuff lolz” cause he is always on twitter for some reason. We did eventually get things done, but I was a bit angry when they were messing around sometimes, I mean well, it just felt weird in a way.

Next is the actual newsletter which nobody will read, but hey it was still worth a few points. Our newsletters format was pretty good, the lining, the font and the size was controlled pretty well in my opinion because the formatting when we did it looked good. As with the content, I feel like we all did “decent” content, is it our best? No, it is most definitely not.

For a summary, I feel like we did a substantial job, it wasn’t bad, but it is definitely not good. I wouldn’t say I had high expectations but this is not our best and maybe next time we can do something better. This unit was hardly enjoyable in my opinion, it wasn’t hard but it was very tiring and confusing in some ways. It is a process of our learning and maybe we did learn something new in this unit, I don’t think others would look forwards to this unit but I think they will learn something from it.