Before the start of the semester, I would have thought that journalism was simple and just telling the news, but now my opinion has changed. First, I have realized that there are many ways to tell a news story. Some types of journalism that I learned about through this class were investigative journalism and visual journalism. Investigative journalism is when a reporter focuses on some type of topic and simply investigates it. Visual journalism is one of my favorites because I like to think that a “picture is worth a 1,000 words.” Combing a picture with writing enhances a story.

Another element to journalism or how news is told that intrigued me was the seven news values. After going through the semester, reading news articles I was able to pick out why the news article was being published. Whether it was timeliness, impact, conflict, prominence, proximity, oddity, or human interest taking this course allowed me to understand these seven news values that help create news stories.

The last element to how news is told that is important is understanding fake news. News can be told in many ways and sometimes the information that is provided is false and only published to mislead readers. Through this course understanding fake news made it easier to distinguish what was real and what was not. Journalism 200 was able to turn me into a highly news literate person when reading news stories because I felt in control of news media influence and throughout the semester I had a mindful thought process.

Overall, news is more complicated than I once thought and that news takes time to develop a thoughtful story to release to the public. I respect journalists because they pour their heart out to create the best news story.

An article from ProPublica, by Joaquin Sapien and Joe Sexton, discusses possible jury contamination in the Eatn Patz murder case. Within the article, the authors mention how there had been a trial already for Etan’s murder and how it ended in a mistrial. The second trial eventually started and jurors from the first trial attended the second trial. The judge did not want jury members to know that there was a trial before this, but a court officer had told jurors about previous jury members attending the trial. Friendships occurred within both jury sets and this set off suspicion in the court room. The sources that were used within this article was ProPublica and Newsday. The authors changed names of specific jury members to hide their identity.

Tysen Benz, 11-years-old, commits suicide after hearing that his 13-year-old girlfriend committed suicide. Apparently, the comments posted to social media about the 13-year-old girl was false and she did not commit suicide. Corey Williams, the author of the article; Michigan boy, 11, hangs himself after social media prank; juvenile charged, discusses how Tysen responded to the false accusations that he was going to kill himself and no one did anything about it. Social media is a big aspect in teens lives and when false comments arise on social media outlets, peoples reputations will be ruined. That is exactly what happened to the juvenile that was charged for the cyberbullying crime. Creating false statements and posting them on social media outlets will definitely have its consequences. In this case, the consequences were large resulting in one death and someone receiving criminal charges.