The Challenge put fourth by yours truly, for yours truly, is to have at my disposal, the sum of at least 500 words written by the end of each day of the working week. Weekends are an exception, or at least, not mandatory to the challenge.
It has been suggested to me on more than one occasion that carrying out such an exercise will do a number of positive things for my journalistic aspirations. The idea here, is to not actually think all that much about what one is going to write, nor be particularly concerned with the quality of the end result. Rather, it is to simply let one’s mind flow freely, while one’s fingers simply act as scribe for whatever random thoughts leap into one’s consciousness. This, it is said, allows one to practice the art of writing on a routine basis, which as with all activities, generally betters one’s ability at such tasks. It is also said however, that this particular writing exercise (at least for journalists, authors etc.) can often lead to the formulation of ideas for ‘stories’ or articles, without so much as ‘trying’.
Glancing down at the word count below however, I notice that I have currently written a total of 185 words. And yet, nothing of any particular interest seems to have come to mind, which consequently means that nothing of any particular interest has found it’s way into this blog. Nevertheless, I shall persevere.
University has after all, at long last, returned for the year this week. So I suppose doing this can only be a good thing. I have signed myself up for two subjects on campus, and am yet to secure an internship with a media organization which shall act as my third. So that’s that. Broadcast Journalism is likely to be the interesting subject of the two that kicked off this week, whilst Media Industries has already turned off most of the 3rd year journo kids. With a first assignment being an annotated bibliography, it’s not hard to see why most of us in the course have already put the next 12 weeks of this subject down to yet another waste of thousand or so bucks.
The ability to research, and find source material, or texts, is no doubt a useful task for a working journalist. Yet one does wonder, with newspaper articles or any other forms of general media not permitted to be used as sources in the assignment, if this is really contradicting what most journalists will be required to do when in the field. I’m not sure, but neither am I going to waste any more time thinking about it this evening.
With 450 words already written for my first 500 word a day exercise challenge, I am content this evening on settling for a blog that fails to really raise any issues whatsoever, and certainly not solve any. With an an interesting book open at the fourth chapter beside me, written by the former editor of The Age – Michael Gawenda – and it being 10.30pm at night, meaning either Tony Jones or Leigh Sales is on ABC’s Lateline, it’s time for me to hang up my boots on this one.
Over and out.
