LDOC and By Lines
It’s Fall LDOC (last day of class) here in Chapel Hill and that means a lot of things are coming to an end. (With the exception of exams, those of course are starting.) The great thing about my classes at Carolina as a senior in the journalism school is that most of my classes are very hands on, real world, experience based.
This year I had the opportunity to be a part of two particularly amazing classes: UNC Media Hub and New Media Technology and its Impact on the Future of Advertising, Marketing and PR. These classes had two very different premises.
Media Hub focuses on journalism students at UNC developing timely, high quality, storytelling journalism in our chosen medium. Mine, broadcast video, tends to be short form at a high turnover rate, so this class was a fantastic opportunity for me to take time to perfect my storytelling ability and produce some pieces I am very proud of.
I was able to chose some stories I really wanted to tell: from a fellow UNC student defying the odds, to what it means to be an Instagram influencer. I really put my skills to the test when I chose to cover the breaking news of the Department of Education’s investigation into UNC’s Clery Act violations, which came out this semester.
One of my videos was even picked up by the Raleigh Durham broadcast station WRAL and published on their online homepage. This video documents the discovery and dating as well as a trip to the Ancient North Carolina Bald Cypress Trees in small town Ivanhoe, NC along the Black River. Let me tell you, this was not an easy story to get. I stayed in Chapel Hill for the first day of fall break and got up at 5:45 a.m. to leave from my classmate’s house at 6 a.m. for Ivanhoe. We drove for two hours to meet our guide, an avid kayaker willing to take us 11 miles down the river through the twists and turns of the swamp where the trees live. We were on the river for almost 6 hours that day filming from kayaks. I didn’t get back to my apartment in Chapel Hill until 9:30pm, but we came back with an awesome story.
While my heart is set on being a broadcast journalist, I still enrolled in an AD/PR class: New Media Technology and its Impact on the Future of Advertising, Marketing and PR. That long name was a little intimidating at first, but it was with one of my favorite professors. Our lectures consisted of analyzing media-focused Black Mirror episodes and assessing the future of virtual reality. Our grades in this class came from a semester-long “campaign” for our “client.” (In quotation marks because of course it began as just for class.) Our task was to run a campaign using technology to convince the Carolina Community to support painting giant Tar Heel footprints on the roads leading in to the town. I was on the video team and had a ton of fun creating content for our social media channels. To check our campaign and the content I helped create in this class, search “Home is Where the Heels Are” on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn. In the end, the athletic department reached out to our campaign with immense interest and the Alumni Association has offered to fund the project.
So at the end of today, the end of another semester, and the end of a set of classes, I was excited to reflect on what I produced this semester. Classes at Carolina are hard, and classes in the journalism school are intense, but I loved my schedule. Of course I’m incredibly excited for break, but I am also excited to come back to my last semester of interesting and challenging classes.