Adventures at OU

The best way to describe my first day here would be eye opening. OIDJ is the Oklahoma Institute for Diversity in Journalism. The plans for this week are really to experience journalism and its different aspects, which I have already begun to do.

This morning we went to the Oklahoman, the biggest and longest-running newspaper in the state (this is its 100th year). What I was expecting to see when I got there were people working in dingy, gross cubicles with bad lighting covering boring subjects.

My first thought when I walked in was "Wow."

There were cubicles, but they were anything but dingy and gross. The light fixtures were extremely cool. They were like these strips with holes poked in them. The newsroom was spread out in a collaborative way with people covering similar subjects together. The room that we spent most of our time in had these awesome floor to ceiling windows so that we could watch people work.

One of my biggest surprises today was the different type of subjects journalist write about. One of them talked to us about covering religion without having bias. Then we had an intern tell us about being a business reporter and how many different subjects fall under business, which was really interesting. When I think of business, I usually just think about an everyday business like McDonald's, not necessarily an insurance company (which was what he was currently writing about). Then someone spoke to us about marketing.

The marketing presentation was slightly disturbing to say the least. There we found out that companies can send us ads when we connect to different public wifi.s The advertisers can also get other information from our phones like our email address and our actual home address.

Hearing that, makes me never want to connect to public wifi again.

The last presentation was my favorite because it was about the Thunder, and I am a big Thunder fan. I can't play basketball, but I do like to watch. He told us about a lot of benefits that writing about the Thunder have afforded him, like visiting California for the first time during the playoffs against Golden State. I really love how excited and passionate he was about his job.

Once we returned to campus, we had a tour of the North and South Oval of the school. I've been to OU before, but today I saw a side of OU I haven't seen before. Every time since I've come to campus before, I only get to see little chunks and pieces like the gym or Gaylord. Today on the tour, I really saw all a lot of little pieces that make it great like the beautiful libraries, the small campus and friendly people like our awesome tour guide, Jonathan. Then this afternoon we learned about about profiling and how to properly do it. Profiling is basically finding the interesting thing within someone and making that the center piece of your story. All in all, my first day here has been grand.