Web Sites, movie reviews, being on TV, and going to the radio station our second semester of mass comm. was busy! Our first few days of mass comm. were all about learning the terms for newspapers: flag, captions, heading, banner, and so much more. I never knew all the terms it took to understand a newspaper. Mr. G.S. even had Jim Nolan from The Richmond Times dispatch to come in and teach about what it took be on the newspaper. He told us our stories should be so descriptive it should paint pictures in the readers head. He also told us about his experiences and all the places gets to travel to and people he gets to meet for his job (celebrates, presidents, etc). He told us the main thing you need to have on this is passion and love for this job.

            During this semester we were able to go on a field trip to the radio station Clear Channel. When we first got to the radio station there was huge tower being held up only by cable wires! This was use to send their radio stations all over Richmond. When I walked in and saw all of those people, I realized it took a lot more than I thought to make this radio station work.

There were people to add special effect noise, people to make computer deigns for fun raisers and other things, people to sell ads that will go on the radio stations, and the people who would play the music and broadcast. We were lucky enough to meet all of theses people. I thought the coolest part of this trip was to meet the people who you would hear every morning before you go to school. We got to meet Melissa Chase and Sid from Q94.  They told us if we ever wanted to be on the radio the best way to start out was to be an intern (that was how they started out).

In this class we also learned how to write movie reviews. Dan Neman who was also from the Richmond Times Dispatch came to talk to us. His job is to watch movies and write about them, like: if the lighting, camera angles, director, actors, and more are, good. He showed us his note book and I couldn’t even read it. We also had to make an art gallery web site, were we had to interview a person and put their art up to be sold.

The last and final thing we did was go into the T.V. studio and learn how to make the morning announcements. It took a lot of people and a lot of work. There had to be talents, computer graphic people, directors, someone to work the teleprompter, and camera people. I worked the teleprompter everything had to be just right or the talents (they are the people who went live) would say it wrong. It also had to be at the right speed or it wouldn’t sound right or they would miss the announcements. Taking this course made me realize all the hard work that goes into every thing and if you want to be successful you have to be able to work as a team.