Essence of Journalism...

I am very much privilege to be a part of the Seminar-Workshop on Basic Journalism initiated by the Office of the Corporate Affairs in our school. It is a two-day workshop pre-loaded with a lot of inputs in journalism. I totally appreciate this kind of activity. Writing has been already a part of me. I've been writing in many forms but honestly I don't have basic knowledge in journalism. Though I am not into news writing but the fact that I did vital documentaries that has something to do with the procurement process, I knew that this one would really be of great help.

Ms. Imma Rae Gatuslao, Chief of the City Information Office (CdeO) was our first lecturer on Writing for University Affairs. I learned a lot from her about corporate communication. I learned that  the corporation's voice and the image it projects should go along well together. We should be able to maintain the integrity by being honest with all our inputs. She emphasized that ETHICS is a necessary component in corporate communication. In writing, we should consider our receiver as part of our constituencies by giving them an appropriate messages through an equally applicable medium that suits their need and situation. 

An effective communication should have the following criteria:

Our lecturer put it simply this way:

Sender --------------->     Message    --------------> Receiver

Medium

after the message was sent through an appropriate media, the receiver may have his feedback which in turn will make the sender as the receiver this time (it's a two way process just as shown on the figure above). The presentation was brief but concise. I also learned about 5Ws and 1H (What, Who, When, Where, Why and How). Informative, indeed!

The second topic was about The Basics of  News Writing  by Mr. Ismael Talili. He gave us our first workshop in straight news writing focusing on our new enrollment system that was recently adopted by the school. After the challenging group activity presentation, a rigid critiquing/editing was done which concluded the first-day session. One powerful point that I learned from his discussion was that, in news writing we should  Keep It Short and Simple (KISS)...

Now, that's what I considered as the essence of journalism!

I am looking forward for another challenging task tomorrow....