JOUR 4250: September 6 Review

It’s always interesting to me to get to hear personal experiences from classmates. As I said in my last post, our class is quite diverse, so getting to hear others commenting and connecting the discussion to their lives is great.

I came from a less than diverse high school when compared to this classroom. For example, according to School Digger, a website designed for parents looking for average test scores and school statistics, my high school’s African American population was 1.6 percent just two years ago. UNT’s African American population for all of this school, according to the UNT Fact Book, is 12.7 percent. To see your school’s information, click here. Coming to UNT has surrounded me with people from all different walks of life. I have made friends from all over, even different countries, and have heard stories of what it was like growing up in different cultures. To me, this is just another benefit of going to a large university. Becoming a UNT student has allowed me to interact with a more diverse group of people.

Our instructor went back over the diversity in a newsroom so we could have an idea of which sets of people are predominantly bringing us the news. The class notes we were shown said newspaper staffs are made up of 12 percent minorities in this country. This is important because we learned that it is possible for journalists to frame stories. This is where stories are reported with an angle according to how the journalist may make sense of the world.

Our class then revisited the example a student made from the first day of class. The student, who works in a newsroom, said there is only one minority reporter. The instructor reminded us how important this was because the same student also said that this particular minority reporter covers stories other reporters typically do not.

The concept of framing made sense to me after this class. Thanks to students’ input and feedback from the teacher, I feel more confident in my ability to become more media literate.