ANITA MCBRIDE knows that the position of First Lady is “probably the most important and most demanding unpaid job in the world.” McBride was the White House Chief of Staff for the first lady from 2005-09 through 3 administrations: Reagan, Bush and Bush. She appeared on C-Span last week to talk to college students, including George Mason University’s.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was the definer of the modern First Lady, says McBride, which means being an activist by using their voice and their platform for the significant social issues of the day.

Traditionally, the First Lady was seen as a homemaker and caretaker; McBride says that “the role of social hostess in our nation is very important; it’s important how we convey the use of the White House, not only to the Americans, but to our international visitors.” Even so, the role of First Lady has become more activist. The First Lady herself decides what social issues she takes on and how much she is involved in them, McBride says. “We expect First Ladies to be deeply engaged in the issues that they care about and issues that the nation cares about.”

The First Lady also humanizes the president in interviews by discussing the hardships her husband goes through and portraying the family side of him.

The job of First Lady is 24/7 but, as mentioned earlier, is not paid. Her staff, however, is paid because they are considered “staff of the office of the president of the United States assigned to the office of the First Lady.”

MORE AND MORE information becomes available online all the time, so more organization of the information is needed as well. The formula to find out what you need to do to organize is this:

“what you need to manage + the right tools to manage it = personal productivity.”

The best place to start getting organized is your e-mail:

-Make folders, like a ‘read this’ and ‘waiting on’ folder

-Take no more than 2 minutes to look at each e-mail.

-Look at an e-mail only once to save time

Journalists and freelance writers also need to organize things like to-do lists, calenders, images, documents, and notes. The best thing you can do for yourself is use fewer tools/websites to organize your things as possible, so that you won’t have too many things to check at once. Using web-based programs are the best option so that you can share your material with anyone and access it from anywhere.Some free programs include Google Docs and Zoho. Some services you do have to pay for, but there are many free programs/services available online.

As for organizing the information itself, databases and spreadsheets can be useful tools for a journalist: Databases and spreadsheets are useful for keeping contacts’ information (name, address, phone number, etc.), as well as keeping stories with a lot of data organized.

Video journalism is an important way of telling a news story, whether its breaking news or a documentary, but there are a few different approaches. The biggest question one might ask is how much the quality of the video matters, and the answer is not much: “…the audience for video has become extremely forgiving and is now open to all levels of quality…quick and less polished video content on news sites often draws bigger audiences.” Sometimes the less polished videos are the most authentic ones and the audience knows it and is drawn to it.

Here, for example, is a video clip of the Japanese tsunami of 2011:

It is a bit shaky and not the best quality, but it is a professional video clip from CBS. It is the content that the users are most interested in and not the quality, especially when it comes to breaking news.

The difference between producing breaking news stories and documentaries is the time you have to plan your story. With breaking news it is important to simply get to the news scene and get footage of witnesses, first-hand accounts, and the overall environment of the incident- even if it means using a cell phone to record video. If it is a documentary, then you will want to take your time on it and make a storyboard. For both documentaries and interviews you will want to create a script.

Here are some tips for recording video:

• It is good to shoot a variety of ranges (wide, medium, and tight), but do not overuse zoom (aka don’t record while you are zooming) as it makes a video look more amateur.
• Shoot video like you are taking a still picture. A tripod is a good idea.
• Sound is important! Make sure the audio is loud and clear- nobody will watch a video if they can’t hear what’s going on. Also, have a variety of sounds in your video, like ambient (background) noise, natural noise, voiceovers, etc.

One important thing to remember is that you should always be flexible and record what may not seem important now but could become important later on.

THE DIGITAL AGE has socialized news, which means that the people who read the news are now the people who also take part in it. “[…] information wants to be analyzed, shared, synthesized, curated, aggregated, commented on and distributed. Even journalists feeling overwhelmed by new technology can see that more interaction with the audience carries big benefits.”

There are, however,  problems with having your audience be a part of your writing: News commentators are generally not constructive or respectful and there are either too many or too few of them. Forums are evolving, however, so that newsrooms are accepting more responsibility for the comments, commentators expect more from each other, and technology is improving.

It’s not just on a News websites page that this occurs either, it is also social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter which provide feedback from readers. Lending socialization to other sites has created more sources for News.

Social media is the next big thing and any organization or journalist that ignores this fact will be left behind; you always need to be where your audience is and social media is where they are today.

Audio is a very powerful tool when used right. What makes audio effective is that it is a more personal experience than video or text generally is: Usually listeners are alone (in a car or in their room), so that makes it more personable. Audio is not only for the car, though;  it can be used for a podcast or slideshow, for example. Today NPR leads the industry of audio journalism.

Here’s what makes good audio journalism:

• Script: Even though it may seem like it’s okay to just ‘wing it,’ having a script is a good idea so that the audio sounds more professional.
• Practice: Find out which questions yield the best results by asking your questions before recording so that you know which questions were the best to ask, then ask the best questions again when you record.
• Finding the right spots: There should be minimal background noise, such as traffic or crowds, wherever you record.
• Natural noise: Use natural sounds that make the story more authentic, such as puppies barking at a pet adoption event.
• Be a performer: You have to keeps things interesting to hook your audience, so be enthusiastic and get their attention.

Just the same way that anyone can be a journalist, anyone can be a photojournalist (just take a look at Flickr). You just need to be at the right place at the right time with either a camera or a cameraphone. But news is different things to different people, so any picture could potentially be photojournalism.

Here are a few pointers to make photos more professional:

• Lighting is important! Make sure it is not too bright or dark wherever you are. Natural light is preferable to flash light.
• Get close to the subject! Move around if you need to get a good angle
• Do what you can to keep still. Put your elbows on something or lean on a wall.
• Focus on the subject and cut out all of the clutter that could distract a viewer.

Photo editing is important too. Most times your picture will be a little too dark or blurry, etc. and you need to make the image as clear as possible. Here’s an example of a photo I took at the Chinese lantern festival at GMU:

Original Photo

Edited Photo

See the difference? It might not be perfect, but most times a little editing will make the photo much more clear and easier to focus on what’s important in the photo.

Don’t know what microblogging is? How about Twitter? Twitter is the best example of microblogging as its most popular platform. Microblogging is really quite simple: You are your own publisher of anything piece of writing in 140 words or less (called a “tweet” on Twitter). It is a more effective way to report and follow news than anything else because of it’s real time feed function. Microblogging also allows for more interaction among users: You can “retweet” what someone else says, use a “hashtag,” which allows users to see all tweets related to a specified subject, or direct a tweet to someone using @example.

IN THIS CHAPTER I LEARNED more about audience participation in contemporary news organizations and blogs. Crowdsourcing is when journalists give audiences tasks (sometimes paid and sometimes not) just like a professional reporter. For example, if a scandal occurs involving, lets say, mortgage rates, then the community affected will be able to give more vital information than a few reporters might be able to uncover. Of course there is a limit to crowdsourcing; you should use it to help your organization or blog improve, but according to Briggs there is a greater chance of failure if you rely solely on crowdsourcing to power your news. Another way to rely on readers is to use open-source reporting, which means that an organization or blog can put out their ideas for their stories up early so that they can attain feedback, sources, and other advice from their readers to help build the story. Yet another form of reporting is beatblogging: I wasn’t too sure about what it was from the book, but I looked up more information on beatblogging.org and found that it is a blog that focuses on one topic and allows anyone to comment, debate, discuss, etc. Pretty simple. Pro-Am Journalism I already knew about through CNN’s iReport. With Pro-Am users post their own content directly to an organizations website.

I DIDN’T KNOW too much about blogs except that they seemed like personal diaries which I didn’t see as having much of a place in journalism. After reading the second chapter of Briggs’ book, however, I realized that blogs are opened for doing anything and everything you want with them (depending on the context of course) and they are a resourceful tool when in comes to interacting with readers; after all you can’t make good news if you don’t know what your audience wants to hear. I would like to find an audience for myself as well because as a journalist I need feedback to know whether my writing is captivating and informative enough. Through this blog I hope to find my “blogging voice,” which Briggs said you find after time with practice. The book also had me explore different blogs to find out for myself the diversity among them. Not surprisingly I found the number one blog as ranked by Technorati.com, The Huffington Post, to be my favorite. In fact I was delayed in making this blog post because I got so caught up reading Huffington Post articles!

BRIGGS’ FIRST CHAPTER DABS in HTML and other computer terms that I was not very familiar with, and so I have compiled a list summarizing them:

• RSS: I’ve known for a long time that RSS feeds existed, but I didn’t know much about what they were. RSS feeds are short summarizing paragraphs of news or other information of your choosing sent to an RSS reader with a permalink to the article. RSSs are updated daily and seem to be an efficient way of obtaining news and other information, however I find that Twitter is even more efficient since you can have a live stream of information.
• CSS: HTML that makes webpages fancy.
• FTP: File Transfer Protocol “is a simple process for moving those big files that e-mail can’t handle.” They’re useful when you want to transfer a file larger than 1 MB to another server or computer. You simply download an FTP program, obtain the host address that you want to send the file to and wala!
• HTML: A little more complicated a subject is HTML which is the code that makes up a website. I tried to make a webpage with HTML code, copying the directions in the book and the best I got was this:

I did exactly what the book said and that’s what happened. I tried adding photos too and the same thing happened- all that showed up on the website is code… I didn’t even bother trying the instructions for CSS to be honest, but hopefully I’ll be able to figure out what went wrong in the near future. Webmonkey, a site Briggs recommended in his book for HTML advice and tutorials, seems to be useful and so I’ll browse that site to see if anything helps.