Don”t panic when things go wrong. Breathe.

Don’t be too dependent on your Supervisor. Think on your own feet.

Get people, preferably non-CS students, to read your articles. See if they understand what you’re talking about.

EDIT EDIT EDIT.

Don’t patronise your group mates. If there’s something wrong with their articles, TELL them.

Don’t raise your voice at your group mates.

Be patient.

ASK for help/advice  if you are stuck. Be open to ideas.

You are going to learn a lot more doing your FYP than any other modules you have taken. Enjoy.

The article is a revelation of their personal lives. One journalist, also a shoes addict, wears flashy stilettoes to get herself noticed…

Looks like photojournalists are crossing the line over to the duties of the writers. While some experimented it long ago, others struggled with the new trend. Brent Foster of the Los Angeles Times shared very briefly why he had resisted the change and what he had learned from his first try.

Also, check out the photo narration by Tyler Hicks.

They struck me as the biggest difference between traditional and online journalism. While all focus is on content in print journalism, the expectation of online journalism goes beyond the stories to the personal information of journalists and their interaction with their audiences. My question is, wouldn’t news be judge based intimate details on top of journalistic skills? Seems like journalists today have to play their own PR for their stories and expose their personal life like a celebrity.

When I chose to major in Journalism, I didn’t think selling myself would be part of the job.

What’s most shocking (or am I lagging) was that 71 percent would advice recent graduates to become a freelancer to get experience or to make a career out of it. But can everyone afford that? What happens to those promising but poor journalism students? I suppose say goodbye to journalism altogether or become a part-time freelancer.

When I was doing my internship in Nepal, never there was a day I had to crack my brain for a story idea. Being a foreigner I have strangers opening up to me and tell me their stories. At the end of my attachment I still had 4 story ideas in my notebook I have no time to work on. What WGAL did was bringing strangers, a whole lot more, into the newsroom, without having reporters to establish a relationship, or look foreign and approachable.

Tired. I dimmed the fluorescent lights with the remote control fitted on the wall. I pressed the button on the rail to lower the bed. I looked around making sure all my valuables are kept in the safe box underneath the bedside table. I took off the headphone. A short, repeated cry of a newborn came beyond the pink flower-motif curtain. A calm and deep woman’s voice responded with a lullaby.

I breathed in and out. The baby’s cry drowned by my whistling nose. I sank deeper into the bed.  

Just one more second and I would have fallen asleep. But someone drew open the curtain, unveiled two confused faces and a lifeless body between them. I leaped out of the bed. I’m her daughter.

I wasn’t the patient. My mum was. We had been in the hospital since 8a.m. We were asked to wait. From the brown leather armchair, I joined my mother on the bed when my buttocks began to hurt after five hours.  Together we read our books, until she was pushed into the operating theatre at 3p.m. I stayed in the bed.

I moved aside as the nurses transferred her onto the dented mattress.  I’ve met eight “nurses” in the last nine hours. There were staff nurses, enrolled nurses and this time patient care assistants. The lower the ranking and the dirtier the job, the older they are and the farther they came from. The aunties in the room right now only wheel patients from room to room.

No Singaporean wants to get their hands dirty, especially the younger ones. So the government imports labour. Beyond the hospital, young Singaporean engineers design the flats, Chinese middle age Tow Kay (boss) buy the building materials and the Bangladeshis do the construction work. At Cold Storage supermarkets, the China Chinese pack your ham and bacon, the Singaporean aunties collect your money at the cashier and the ang moh manager receive your complains.

She looked amazingly gentle, not exactly the person I knew for 23 years. Anesthesia. A lady in her early twenties is here again. If not for the stethoscope and lanyard around her neck, the knee-length skirt, purple tight-fitted top, kitten heels and pretty, painted face hardly registered as a doctor.  She’s still carrying the red shoulder bag. The doctor had it with her the last five times she did her rounds. And like the five times before, she spoke in broken Mandarin with ridiculously formal vocabulary.

We learn two languages in school. English and our mother tongue. For a long time the latter was deemed unimportant or irrelevant in many formal settings. The elites, usually born in English-speaking family, barely speak Mandarin beyond their Chinese classes. Others who couldn’t cope with the compulsory subject, have either fled to international schools or migrated.

I couldn’t keep my eyes away from the bag. Why are you always carrying it? Her mobile and valuables are inside, she told me. The male doctors have pockets in their pants. Apparently she has only skirts in her wardrobe…