Making words match your medium

       Writing is essential to great journalism; it's the foundation, the bigger picture, and the main thing that brings a story to life for a reader.  I've always known that writing is the most important thing for papers, but I believe my experience here at MU's J-School has really shown me that writing is important for all types of journalism, including the newest member to the J-family, convergence.

       My main reason for switching to convergence this summer was to gain some extra skills to make myself more marketable as a broadcast journalist upon graduation.  I thought there would be more Internet training and maybe some more use of more different types of equipment.  While we haven't focused heavily on the writing for these different mediums, the examples we've seen in class and our own stories have used more writing than I first assumed.  

       One of the main things I've taken away from this class thus far is that writing for these different journalism mediums is that writing includes so much more than actual words on a paper.  Writing for a story with pictures means taking a scene setter shot, a profile shot, and a close shot to paint a full story.  Writing for an audio story means incorporating natural sound, interesting sound bites, and your own observations to describe a story with only sounds.  As we focus more on our video stories, I am looking forward to the way our pictures, B-roll, and voice overs will help take our viewers to the story.  

     The bottom line is that writing is very important for visual mediums, but that the writing in this sense includes more than just printed words.  Writing for visual or even audio mediums calls for using pictures, sounds, and your imagination to bring a story to life in a creative and interactive way.