Synopsis

I would say the biggest thing I learned this semester was how to effectively build a website. When I say build a website, that also includes everything else we learned to build one. I never thought of making my own website before this class, but now I do and I know all the tools I need to build a good one. This includes basic coding, style tools, photo skills, etc.

Developing the Project

The biggest and most important ethical guideline I followed when working on this story was to remain unbiased. I do have a personal connection to this story because I’ve been a fan of Disney since I was a little girl. I consider myself and many of my family “Disney Adults”. That being said, I wanted to approach and write this story without my personal bias in mind. “Disney Adults” have been a topic of conversation in popular culture for quite some time, and with this story, I wanted to get an accurate depiction of them from all sides, not just the one I am particular to. This brings up the other guideline that I followed, which is making sure to try and get all sides of the story. In this particular story, there are many different sides and opinions regarding “Disney Adults”. So making sure to find someone to represent each side was important to me.

The two biggest challenges I faced in working on this story were gathering sources and multimedia. The people I really wanted to interview were the Disney influencers whose whole job is going to the Disneyland parks and talking about the company. Unfortunately, none of them would respond to my countless messages asking to have a conversation. So, finding sources beyond the two employees I was going to interview was difficult in the sense that I’m not comfortable approaching random people, which is how I found my other source. The other challenge I faced was choosing what kind of multimedia I wanted to include. The main thing I wanted to do was interview people in Disneyland about whether or not they were a “Disney Adult”. Sadly, I could not get a reservation to go into the parks, so that was completely scrapped. Then, I had to move on to doing an interview video with one of my sources. That brought on a whole other set of challenges because I am not the best videographer. I had difficulties filming and also editing the video, but eventually, I overcame them.

The biggest opportunity I had when working on this story was to showcase my knowledge of Disney because it is extremely vast. It may seem like an incredibly unimportant topic to know so much of, which it is, but it’s my special interest. So, gathering information for the story was not too hard and entertaining for me. My passion for the topic I chose was my main opportunity because it made every step of the process I went through this semester enjoyable.

Ditgital Media Experience

While I knew what working in digital journalism entailed, this class and what we learned helped me get more in-depth knowledge of it. I now know all that it takes to fully develop a website and how to build it with viewership and engagement in mind. Building the website, learning how to use all the tools available to us to create different digital media, and using the site to put our work on really immersed me into the world of digital journalism and will help me when it comes to other projects in the future. The whole process of our final story has created a foundation for me to add on to as I step into my career.

The usage of data, databases, and Microsoft Excel in class intimidated me. Everything else in digital media I found interesting, but numbers and data really did not interest me. I’m just not good with numbers or math, so I was a bit scared, but once we started working with data it went away. The way it was explained step by step helped me understand what we were looking for. The main heroes of this story though, are the shortcuts and programs that we were taught in class. Without those, I would have never been able to do all the math and analysis needed for the data in digital journalism.

Working with programs like WordPress, HTML, CSS, etc. was my favorite part of the semester. I enjoyed the process of learning about the program and then applying it to our website. I had previous experience working on WordPress for an internship I completed, but I mainly just imputed things. Getting to build the actual website and designing it was completely new to me, and it’s a skill I know I’m going to be using for a while. My absolute favorite thing we did though, was learn how to code HTML and CSS. It was challenging and very tedious at times, but I felt very scholarly typing in code for things instead of just inputting them on the front end. I barely even scratched the surface of coding, and I know apart from WordPress I wouldn’t be able to code very well, but it inspired me to learn.

Now that I’m a senior at SDSU, I’ve had time to reflect on what I want to do after I graduate. I originally was solely focused on the writing aspect of journalism because I wanted to be a writer, but now I’m leaning toward public relations and social media management. So, learning social storytelling tools was interesting. As an internet kid, I am very well-versed in social media, but in class, we delved deeper into the analysis of it, which I liked. Because of how advanced and prominent social media is in our current society, seeing how much of a story you can tell through searching through social media was wild to me. It helped me get a better grip on what I could do to research for future clients in my career.

I’m big on customization and individuality, so the most enjoyable part of working on my website was customizing it to reflect me. The website, apart from being the home of all my JMS 430 assignments, was also supposed to reflect me as a journalist. So, picking a theme, customizing, changing colors, inputting CSS, etc. was my favorite part. My favorite part of working on my story was the research. As I said, Disney is a somewhat special interest of mine, so researching the history of Disney Adults and the impacts they’ve made was incredibly interesting to me. I also really liked hearing my sources’ stories and the different opinions and feelings they might have about Disney.