For my audio portion of the feature, I interviewed UW-Whitewater communications professor Amal Ibrahim and Pulaski High School alumnus Cheryl Gensler. Ibrahim has been teaching for a couple of decades and comes from a background where new communication technologies were nowhere near as advanced as they are today. In her earlier days of teaching, equipment was very big and editing was very time-consuming. Nowadays, everything is much faster and there are many varieties of software updates it seems every semester. Ibrahim told me that while technologies have helped out her teaching style significantly, she still looks forward to seeing her students every class because she simply prefers teaching them face-to-face. Gensler graduated from Pulaski High School in the early ’90s and had to use typewriters for homework. I asked her what current technology she wished she could’ve had in her day, and she somewhat surprisingly told me that she really misses going to the library and actually reading a hard-covered book. She wishes her two kids still follow with what she did during her school days but realizes that it’s impossible for that to happen. Gensler told me she is skeptical of all of these technologies one day going away and wants to make sure that there are always thousands of hard-covered books stocked on hundreds of shelves in the library.
For my video portion of the feature, I interviewed two UW-W students as well as journalism professor Dr. Keith Zukas. The first student I interviewed was accounting and information technology double major Kayla Williams. She told me she always grew up with a computer in the house mostly because of her father’s job. On some days, she could come home early from school and do research on her computer at home. As far as her double major goes, accountants and IT individuals essentially feast on new communication technologies in order to do their jobs. Williams told me for the IT side that technologies nowadays have really helped the quickness of data entry. The second student I talked to was electronic media major and video production assistant Richard Houcque, who uses a lot of the editing software programs on-campus to do his video projects. He told me the Adobe platform is one of the “premiere editing tools” for him and claims that if was not for the editing lab on the UW-W campus, it would be impossible for him to do any of his work. Dr. Zukas, in addition to teaching journalism classes on-campus, is the adviser for the Royal Purple and realizes just how much new technologies are changing the journalism industry. He told me despite the challenges journalists are facing from NCTs, including how everyone can be their own journalist nowadays, various forms of news content has actually been increasing over the last couple of years. He told me in order for these increasing subscription rates to continue, Zukas noted that journalists need to keep doing their jobs the right way and ultimately reaching as many readers/viewers as possible. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJzjgXnYfww).
My photography section essentially combined content from the audio, video, and text portions of the feature. I included a similar story and all of my sources in the photography part. The only difference was obviously the variety of shots I used. In order to do so, I took roughly an hour of my time walking around campus and taking as many shots necessary for my story. I visited Hyland Hall, Heide, the Royal Purple newsroom and the UWWTV station. I took a couple of pictures in some of my classes as well mainly to get a human aspect into the feature.
While doing all aspects of the feature took a lot of time for me to complete, I was happy in the end just to see my hard work done. Everything ultimately paid off for me too because I received a good overall grade on the project.