Jay Rosen’s “When starting from zero in journalism go for a niche site serving a narrow news interest well”

In Rosen’s blog post he talked about new journalists having to start in a niche area and should keep in mind to know “everything on something”. This applies my group project in many ways. In this project, we are not just school kids learning and doing a simple report. This project is for the people. It is not just a poster board for the class, it is an actual multimedia work for the world to view. So being that this is for the people, we need to know what we are talking about. We must be able to talk to others who are interested in our particular field that we have chosen and people have to be willing to listen to us. We have to learn as much as possible. We have to bring ourselves into the conversation, bring ourselves up to par. Our audience is so much more than the class or the professor, so we have to write for that audience, those who know about this topic and want to listen to others to keep themselves updated. To do this we have to do more than just a quick Wikipedia search and especially more than an interview or two. Interviews are great. You can find out a lot from those who are already in the field. You can hear what they say and gain knowledge as well as a base for having experts in the field for this particular area, but it is not enough. This project, as stated before, is not just for a class, but the people in the field, so how would those in the field feel about this? Yes, we have talked to experts and know how to conduct an interview, but they want to hear what we have to say as well. We have to be able to participate in the conversation. Conversations involve both listening and speaking your own thoughts on the matter. So interviews alone will not cut it. We must be able to research what’s out there and speak on the matter ourselves. We have to be able to read academic articles, journal articles, blogs, all the places where this conversation is being held. To accurately join a conversation we must speak educated on the subject rather than just playing recorded bits of an interview because those are not our own thoughts, our own ideas, our own voices. This article is very important in the context of my group work. This group project is more than a simple group project it is a part of a conversation. It is not stuck in a classroom only to be seen by bored classmates who could honestly care less, this is supposed to be looked at and written for those who are talking about this. So interviews are not enough because we have to join the conversation, not just record bits and pieces of it. This is a project to contribute to an area and to contribute we have to learn as much as possible from as many sources as possible.