Journalism Program of the Year with Professor Julie Beard

At the very beginning, I expected Professor Beard’s speech to be uninteresting because she was talking about the Journalism program. I am not interested in that type of Mass Communication. In her speech, she surprised me; she got my attention when she started talking about news values, or what defines a story, and what stories to pick with a limited amount of space. Besides writing stories for a newspaper or television programs, one has to find time for advertising too. In order to pick out the stories, one has to use good judgment. I learned that there are characteristics such as impact, timeliness, prominence, proximity, conflict, human emotion, visual opportunity, and the bizarre and unusual when television or newspapers inform us of the news. She believes the more news values a story has, the more likely it should be the one picked. After she explained what news values were, she gave the class an activity on how to pick a story. The exercise showed us how to use news values by picking out the top three newsworthy stories out of the four she gave us. The activity was really fun, and it was very interesting to see my classmates’ and my points of view. Professor Beard’s speech was really surprising because I thought it would be all about Journalism, but she ended up teaching me something I did not know about, something I would need when I began working with the media. She made her presentation very interesting for everyone intrigued by Journalism and working in other fields of the media.