Week one of the Big Issue online journalism course has flown by so quickly. While I started the course with a bit of an idea of what to expect I didn’t realise exactly how much I was going to learn.
I have never been involved in the media side in any of my previous jobs as a youth adviser and english teacher, so news reporting, writing and using social media are areas that are totally new to me.
With a love of photography I thought this course would be a brilliant new challenge and give me some extra skills that could work alongside taking photos. This seemed to be the case for the rest of the group, which was made up of a variety of interesting individuals from various backgrounds.
Like me most people came with experience in either writing or photography, but by the end of the week we had all published our first articles onto the course blog and taken some great photo portraits, like the one above of Frances I took.
We also learnt about extracting news from press releases and turning it into a piece suitable for a newspaper or online article and started to learn how to use a cameras to take pictures to go alongside a story.
After the first week I am already becoming more familiar with how news articles are written and I’m looking forward to writing more blogs and doing more photography.