Well not much is going to change with our paper this week. We’ve been stricken with a bout of lethargy over here, although we did put up a couple of videos on our website last week.
Those and all future videos we put will go under the multimedia heading on our front page. There you will be able to see various movies and slideshows such as our slideshow on Dia de la Raza, or our production video camera, which we will be filming for again this week.
These elements show how we are improving with our ability to get news out faster. The past two weeks we have mainly been putting things up for our online things, and those things are more time consuming. Also we have had the print edition of our paper planned out for the past week or so, which obviously makes some of the harder things a little bit easier.
This week these side projects have left us no time to work on improving different elements of our paper. We should be changing some more fonts in our paper, but due to the other things that my colleagues and I have been working on we haven’t gotten to them.
These articles would have been finished by now though, if not for our other problem: motivation in our newsroom.
My specific problem is this; it’s hard to keep people motivated for something that they are going to be doing eight times over the space of a school semester. I find it hard to motivate myself most of the time.
Part of the problem is the unrestricted access we have to computers. The internet is quite a double edged sword. On one hand we have access to all the knowledge we will ever need, and a near limitless ability to reach the people we need to talk to for our articles. The access to the pool of knowledge allows us to do our articles faster, but also to procrastinate longer, giving us wayyyy to much time to screw around. So, on the other hand though we have access to just as many games and distractions such as Youtube and flash game sites.
The other part of my problem is that the newspaper is for the most part my social life, sad as that is. This makes me way too entertained by the people in the newsroom and so I can never concentrate in there. I know it’s this way with some of the other people on my staff because they go into our back room, but the socializing still goes on in there. There’s no escaping it.
So I have to go back to my house, which has more distractions by the way. Despite all of this, I’m actually a very productive writer. If I have my sources already, I can bang out an article in 45 minutes. It’s just the getting in the mood that is the hard part. For example this has been written in about that length of time, but I’ve been “working on it” all day.
Now we come to my point in writing this. This has obviously been quite a rambling edition of the View From Here, ok more rambly than most of them. However, this one does have a point, and that is to show you, our readers, that we’re just like you guys. We have the same problems with motivation, and procrastination that you do.
The reason I share this with you is because people don’t trust the media anymore, and I feel that opening our production process should help you relate to what we feel, and do here at the Skyline View.