Mass Communications at Lincoln High School

By: Ainsley Vondeling Podcasts have become popular in the last few years for great reasons. They can provide information, tell stories and just entertain the listeners. A lot of work goes into making a good podcast that usually isn’t recognized. With the help of Crystal Ligori, we learned the ins and outs of making a successful podcast. Crystal Ligori has years of experience in radio and reporting on the air, receiving her education at the University of Montana School of Journalism. She has worked with music radio stations at a few companies before she settled at her current job at OPB and knows all there is about producing, audio-editing and news casting. Friends of Lincoln supported her time with Mass Communications as a teaching artist here at Lincoln over the past period. After learning about Crystal’s background and career we had the opportunity to ask her questions about what it’s like to work on radio. Our class learned how fast-paced and exciting radio really is, as Cry...

Illustration Credit: Wikimedia Commons - Zeus, Patrick Yavitz, La Mula Francis -Bella Lo Report for America (RFA) is a program created to revive local newsrooms by recruiting a new wave of emerging journalists.  Journalists can apply to RFA, and newsrooms can apply to have a journalist. For one year, a journalist who is an RFA corps member, can work in a local newsroom, receive extensive training and immerse themselves in the setting.  For the first year, the RFA will pay for half of the journalist’s salary, the local newsroom will pay for one quarter and local donors will also pay for one quarter.  After a second year, the local newsroom will pay for a larger portion of the journalist’s salary. According to RFA’s website, “the crisis in journalism has become a crisis for our democracy,” so RFA wants to “strengthen journalism” and “restore trust in media.”  They hope that by 2022, they can place 1,000 journalists in local newsrooms who are rep...

Everyone is talking about  the new Marvel studios movie, Infinity War . Nearly every Marvel superhero is going to be in this movie and many students are excited. From the old Avengers team with Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) to new characters like Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and… drum rolls please, Black Panther played by Chadwick Boseman. Black Panther was the latest Marvel film that came out. It was directed by Ryan Coogler and it made more than a billion dollars.   Infinity War is directed by the brothers Anthony and Joe Russo. They also directed the movie Captain America: Civil War , in 2016 which sold more than $1 billion in Box Office. This latest Avengers film is about superheros trying to save the planet and the people from Thanos , who wants to collect all six infinity stones in order to destroy half of humanit...

Photo by: Marily Konstantinopoulou ,  Jenna_Wortham_ArtAndFeminism_2016_MoMA.tif  on Wikimedia Commons  By Mei Xu You might have seen Jenna Wortham’s name pop up while reading The New York Times, or perhaps you know her from the podcast Still Processing which she co-hosts with Wesley Morris. Like any other reporter, she writes and focuses on a range of topics, but what sets her apart from many other reporters is her outlook as a woman of color on social issues and new pop culture. Wortham first interned and worked in San Francisco based news papers, including the San Francisco Magazine, Girlfriend Magazine and SF List. When she moved to write for the Times in 2014, Politico described her as “[giving] the magazine additional editorial firepower and cachet," noting Wortham's following of more than 530,000 followers on Twitter at the end of 2014. Now, Wortham who goes by @JennyDeluxe on her social media presence has 754,000 followers on Twitter and 31,500 foll...

Writing about a Podcast By Hudson Longaker The Podcast I listened to was  Stronger Than You Think You Are,  by Your World Within. I found this podcast on Spotify. It was a 5 minute motivational podcast made for people to gain confidence. Your World Within is a group that makes a selection of podcasts for people struggling with a lack of confidence. They use personal stories and strong music to create a really powerful message. In the podcast I listened too, the group talked about stories and personal experiences with lack of confidence to tell people they are stronger than they think they are. It was almost like a song the way the words and the music blended together.

Sammie Howard April 3rd, 2018 9. June 2009,   Crime Scene Do Not Cross" tape ,  Tex Texi I listened to a podcast called Up and Vanished. Up and Vanished is much like the Podcast Serial, each of the 24 episodes describe and try to solve an unsolved case where someone just vanishes with no explanation as to why or how they went missing. Each of the episodes are about 25 minutes. The host personally investigates an unsolved case and tells his experience throughout the whole investigation. He includes phone calls with either cops or witnesses. The tone throughout the episodes is mysterious. And, in the background there is mysterious music, because well the case is unsolved. The intended audience is anyone who loves criminal investigation and who loves anything mysterious. https://upandvanished.com/listen2/

Evan Reynolds 1/11/18 Video #1: “ Mitchell Robbins Microwaves Soup” by Gus Johnson Gus Johnson is an up-and-coming YouTuber known for his erratic, absurdist comedy sketches. Generally between 30 seconds and 2 minutes, his videos implement abnormal experiences and ideas into commentary on everyday life. His latest video, “Mitchell Robbins Microwaves Soup”, is emblematic of this, using an ordinary man’s struggle to turn on a microwave to highlight how people tend to overreact at the smallest things. Johnson plays Mitchell Robbins, an insecure 23-year-old afraid to microwave his can of soup. Mitchell’s slow descent into insanity is chronicled by his brother Mike, who records his meltdowns at various points throughout. Mike is likened unto the audience, trying and failing to explain why his brother is behaving so erratically. Though Johnson’s biggest strength comes from his ability to incorporate numerous sight gags, it’s the extent to which he portrays Mitchell as maniacal t...

By Evan Reynolds For my podcast, I listened to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. FiveThirtyEight.com is a statistical website dealing with important issues of the day (mostly politics). It uses precedent and math to speculate as to the goings-on of the world. As someone who’s interested in politics, it’s quite interesting for me to see people debate this in an entirely different way than I’m used to- facts and numbers aren't something I typically associate with this kind of topic. The topic they were discussing was Cambridge Analytica, the firm associated with the Trump campaign that mined data from millions of Facebook users. They discussed how the issue presents a larger puzzle: will companies like this attempt to use social media to target a specific voter group's interest in the future? One can easily imagine a system in the future in which elections are determined by who can access the most private data. For anyone who is active on social media, this podcast i...

Elizabeth Merenda                                                                                                           Period 1 Mrs. Rechner Mass Communications 3.15.2018 Podcast Review The podcast I listened to was "The Pete and Sebastian Show", which is a comedic podcast starring Pete Correale and Sebastian Maniscalco. The length of a typical episode is a little less than an hour. The two A-list celebrities have made 279 episodes. Each episode ...

Elizabeth Merenda                                                                                                         Period 1 Mrs. Rechner Mass Communications 3.13.2018 PDX Media Day Notes Session 1) Social Media and Journalism This presentation was illustrating how important social media is for journalists. Social media has become a new platform for finding stories and sources. If used properly, journalists can use social media as a very useful tool to e...

~Bella Lo Hidden Brain is a podcast on NPR, hosted by Shankar Vedantam.  A 35 minute and 25 second episode released in late January called “Lost in Translation” explores how speaking different languages shape the way people think.  This was really interesting for those who want to understand how different languages cause people to unconsciously think and view the world in different ways. Vedantam interviews a cognitive science professor of the University of California named Lera Boroditsky.   With a mixture of music soundbites and people speaking foreign languages, Vedantam conducts the interview where he and Boroditsky talk about different aspects of different cultures’ languages.  Boroditsky explains how she went to an aboriginal community in Australia where they didn’t use the words “left” or “right,” but instead, cardinal directions like north, south, east and west. She observed how people in this community have become much more oriented with directions s...