work reflections

I unfortunately fell behind on my journalism projects and I am doing this assignment two months late and at the end of my semester in the class, what this does mean though is I will be able to explain what I (and Dylan) accomplished over the course of the course (pun intended). I was assigned to Web and Layout Design with Dylan and Cassidy, but Cassidy worked more on the social media aspect of it while Dylan and I took care of the Talon as if it were a child. I’m not going to lie the Talon was a mess when we started the class, I sincerely hope that we get a better mark than the dummies who ran it last year because the Talon is looking pretty sharp there now.

Our first task was changing the background to something a little more eye catching, after a couple failed attempts we finally managed to get a background to our liking. Next we rearranged the layout of the Talon a bit, trying to eliminate some of the clutter along the sidebar, with success. Over the course of the semester we worked alongside Cassidy to upload pictures to Google Photos and upload an album of the week, which we did really good at until we sort of forgot about it and left the remembrance day album up for a month. Our biggest task was completely changing the design layout of the Talon. At first we tried to find some cool free ones online but they would either not work right or have a tag on the bottom that we could not remove or leave there. At last we decided on a template found in the regular options of blogger. We rarely actually used the test blog to test any of our attempts but once we got the hang of it we finally managed to successfully change the template of the Talon. For the rest of the semester we deleted old links that no longer worked on old posts, there were a lot of dead links.

Our job as Web and Layout Designers may have completely changed the face of the Talon but it was the hard work of all the other members of Journalism 120 that filled the Talon with all the latest news at Blackville School. There was the news team that simply reported on what was happening in and around BHS. They regularly updated the Talon and kept our readers well informed. The entertainment and people’s picks branches of the news team gave us some of the more light hearted news that kept the Talon fun and enjoyable. The sports team gave us our rosters of the high school sports teams with detailed profiles for each player, using an extremely handsome picture of number 18 on the boys hockey team (in case you didn’t know I’m number 18). The podcasting team would, well to be brutally honest I’m not 100% sure what it is that the podcasting team did, what I think they did was talk about the news that had been posted on the Talon throughout the week. The kids corner team kept the young lads involved with all kinds of coloring contests and other fun activities. The video announcements team apparently posted daily video announcements but I truthfully have never seen one of their videos so I can’t comment too much on their work. Last but certainly not least is the yearbook team that is doing God’s work making an amazing yearbook for our grad class, 5 out of 5 stars for them.

All in all I actually learned some useful information in this class, not to be rude or mean but I didn’t come into this course with high expectations. I learned all kinds of things about how to run a blog and learned about how to be a good journalist. I feel that I have learned some skills that I may actually use sometime throughout my career, which is more than I can say about some of the other courses I took this semester. I feel that Dylan and I accomplished the task that we were given and left next year’s journalism class with big shoes to fill.

Here’s the hyperlink for another school’s news website that in my opinion isn’t near as nice.