Last week I had the opportunity to work with Linda O'Horo on two separate assignments. The first was Wednesday morning when I met her and another student and watched them edit the Slice of Life video. I listened and watched her record the commentary and then observed the other student do the actual editing. They had already gone through all of the footage by this point and the amount of detailed notes Linda had taken about each scene was incredible. Of course, her having such detailed notes made the actual editing process go along much quicker because she already had a general idea of what she wanted to use.

On Friday, she asked me to come and help out with the Politics and Government panel discussion that was held in the afternoon. I got there about an hour early and was lucky enough to speak to two of the panelists for awhile-one of whom was a FOX News caster, the other a Pulitzer Prize Winner. Then I observed how the web streaming is done and also assisted in carrying the microphone around during the question and answer period. It was interesting for me to observe and participate in these two activities because it gave a little more insight into the news/technological side of the department which is of interest to me.

branding

There has not been a lot going on since we got back from Spring Break. Before I left I went in and met with Ericka Kurtz to sort of discuss her job and new projects for me to work on. She also went over all of the branding that OWU underwent relatively recently with the company ologie. A lot of what they are trying to do now is to make our brochures/magazines/post cards simpler and flashier. She showed me an example of an old post card that OWU sent out to perspective students as well as an example of a new one (post branding) and the amount of text on it was cut by over half. They basically were told what you told us so many times in Writing for the Workplace-it has to be short and to the point or people won't read it.

This past Friday I was given the opportunity to attend the Publication Meeting at the Communication's Department. I was given a publication schedule, which I have never seen before, and even for an outsider it was overwhelming. What was kind of fun for me was to see my name on the schedule for a couple of projects. While there I was actually given a new project, to write the next OWU postcard. The postcards are sent to potential students and feature a current student so my assignment was to interview the boy they had already chosen. If all goes well, they've asked me to do the rest of the postcards this year. I am waiting to hear on who I will be working with this week. The only person I've observed so far is one of the computer graphics people which was interesting, but very out of my element, so I'm excited to see what's next.

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My first few weeks with the Communication's Department have been fun, stressful and challenging. About two and a half weeks ago, Pam e-mailed me that they would like to have me write a couple of stories for the Spring alumni magazine. The articles were to be about 300 words and my two topics were: 1)Mary Howard and her involvement with the screening of "Once in Afghanistan" at The Strand and also her own documentary which recently was screened in Columbus called "Swept Out" 2)The EPA grant that the Ohio Five, including OWU of course, received for 2009-2010 which is allowing the schools to better and further current environmental management systems.

My deadline for both stories was this past Wednesday, February 4th and I am very proud of both of them. Being an English major and never having set foot in a Journalism classroom, I was seriously worried if I would be able to write in the style and rhetoric that Pam and her colleagues were expecting. Pam was very helpful in getting background information for me which helped tremendously in preparing for my interviews with Mary Howard and Jann Ichida. The interviews went better than I ever could've imagined; both women were extremely open, allowed me as much time as I wanted to speak with them (which was about an hour in both cases), and gave me more information than I could fit into three 300 page articles.

Well, the plethora of information I just mentioned that I was given made sitting down and actually writing the articles a rather long and tedious task. I picked out the things I found most important, most relevant to the stories and pieced them together a million different ways before I was able to find something that flowed. In the end, I was over my word count by about 100 on each article, but after much editing decided that the people in the Communications Department were probably much better judges of what was essential and what wasn't for their publication.