Justin’s Experience

Today we visited the Capitol building with all of us guys in our suits. It was a very hot day and wearing suits was not the beat of clothing for this day. We had a tour of the Capitol building at to be brutally honest it was not that great. We saw a 15 minute video to begin and the walk tour showed us two rooms in 30 minutes. But the real interesting part of the day was what happened just litterally a few minutes after all of the WJMC students left, there was a shooting at the senate side of the Capitol building just ten or so minutes after I left.

Apparently a man was in a high speed chase and ran into a police officer with hid car. He then fired an automatic weapon and shot a man on the senate side of the building. There was then supposivly 10-15 shots fired. When I was there just a few minutes before I noticed that there are heavily armed officers with m-16s all around the building. I’m sure that these are the officers that fired at the criminal. A few of the men are now in the hospital and that is the most I know about the story right now.

It is just crazy to think I was just at the place when this went down. I learned what happened, when I was eating dinner. A group leader told one student at it then went around like wildfire. I then looked right away on my iPod for a story about it but I could not find one all over the Internet. When I searched it was already 45 minutes after it had happened an I was very surprised no news source had it up yet. After learning all week about the 24 hour news cycle and how quickly stories get out, something like a shooting on Capitol hill in our nation’s Capitol was not covered quickly enough I believe. The journalist part of me wanted to be there so that I had a first hand account and have the first story up on the Internet.

Well let’s all hope that everyone is safe and not in life threatening condition. Also hopefully they did catch this man who did this and justice is served for someone that tried to destroy lives and families.

Last night I was looking forward to posting something about the rest of my day yesterday but the network was down. But anyways after my blog yesterday afternoon we went into DC and went to the Newseum. Now the Newseum was new news to me, ha get it? Lame attempt at a joke late at night. Well I hadn’t hears of this museum before even though I was just in DC a month or so ago. This Newseum was our first stop in DC and rightfully so.

The first exibit that I saw was my favorite one, the FBI exibit. Besides sports journalism, invesitgative reporting is my favorite type of writing. These journalist risk their lives most of the time to find criminals ans their story, I think it’s very amazing. What made my interest peak a little was that just a week ago I went and saw Public Enemies, the story of John Dillinger it was a pretty fantastic movie. But how this related to the FBI exibit in the Newseum is that the first thing you will see is the story and artifacts of John Dillinger, which hooked me in right away like a good lead in an article. After all the FBI was started partly because of John Dillinger, so it was only fitting to have him start it off.

In this exibit of all these different criminals, some new some old, they had many artifacts and the story of each situation. They also had a model of the car that the DC snipers used to take many innocent lives a few years ago. Even tough it was a smaller exibit it was very informative like a good journalist article.

I liked this part of the museum so much that I choose it as a background for a speak on camera thing that they had in another part of the Newseum. What they have is a blue or green screen and they have cameras with teleprompters like news cameras and you pick a background for an on-location type thing. There were about 12 of them to choose from and I was tempted to pick a sports one which was the Nationals ballpark but other people were choosing it also and I wanted something a little bit different. So I chose the FBI exibit and the person in charge had me stand on an x then look into the camera. There was then a 14 or so second count down on the telepromter and then onceuthit zero the show was on. I got into character and started to read the 30 second piece from the script. I felt that I did very well with it and the very sweet older lady working everything asked me if I had done that kind of thing before and I replied with a simple ‘no mam’ because I had not before. She the really flattered me by saying that I should do that kind of thing for my job. I always thought that I kind of wanted tone a sports analyst or reporter for a tv show but I never knew if I had thy kind of talent for it.

Many things have gone on the last few days bit the blog has been down for the last two days, I might share some of the experinces but I might not have the time to share all of them. I also bought the video of me reporting and will try to upload it some time this week.

This day so far has shown me why I am not all-out about journalism. Waking up at 5:30 to eat breakfast and having our group discussions were all good but the real life speaker is what made this day a little bit lame so far.

My fear was that the real life people, the ones that actually make up the journalism field would turn me away from it. Our speaker this morning was Wesley Pippert who was boring compared to Brian Lamb last night. A one hour presentation seemed like eight. He just went on and on about his experiences in journalism and how to twist stories to grap readers attention. This last part is what I did not like at all, I don’t believe that is right to skew numbers and exacerate things to get people to read. Other things should be used such as funny commentary or metaphors instead of twisting the truth.

What we search in journalism is the real truth and how is that supposed to happen when we have leaders in the industry telling us it’s alright to twist the truth? Well I’m now off to the newseum in D.C., maybe that makes this day for journalism a little better. I will post another blog entry tonight after the rest of the events planned.

     I arrived at Ronald Regan International Airport today at around 3:00 pm after a perfectly normal flight ready for my journalism and media conference. I have not been sure what to think about this conference for the last month or so after I was so excited to go. This conference will show me if I will eventually want to get into the journalism and media field. My first passion and only one is business and that is what I will be getting my major and master’s degrees in, but journalism could be something I would like to do on the side.

     This first day here at George Mason has shown me that journalism is a wide spectrum. I have met several different people some that want to write for newspapers, some be an anchor, and some just learning about journalism in order to better their future carrer. I no longer look at journalism as just newspapers and mainstream news. I now look at it as part of blogs, Facebook, video and pictures also. This conference might not be bad for me after all, I believe I can learn a lot from something that I will not go full out in.

     For example our first speaker today was Brian Lamb, creater and co-founder of C-Span. Not only does Mr. Lamb have a journalisticbackground but he is also a business man like I am. It always amazes me to listen to people who start something on their own like businesses and inventions, it takes a forward thinking person to do such a thing. Mr. Lamb showed us that he was looking into the future when he started C-Span and knew that people wanted to know how the people’s government is working.

     Well I am off to bed, I’m waking up early for breakfast and a day packed full of simulations, tours, and speakers. This week is looking good so far and should be a learning experience for me.