UConn Journalism major Sam MacKay strongly dislikes watching the news with his grandmother

Grow­ing up it seemed a tedious task to sit in front of the TV and watch a bunch good look­ing peo­ple talk about how screwed up the world is becom­ing and who to blame for this and that. How­ev­er, as I grew old­er — par­tic­u­lar­ly into my col­lege years — I began to real­ize that the issues of the world did in fact have a sig­nif­i­cant bear­ing on my life; present and future.

That being said, it is still a rar­i­ty for me to watch tele­vi­sion news. Yet, I find that every time I do it is with my dear old grand­moth­er. Things that both­er me about watch­ing with her: A. She still thinks Fox News is unbi­ased. B. She LOVES to talk to and yell fer­vent­ly at the TV when she watches.

So I duck the liv­ing room and look to the mobile world for my dai­ly fix. The eas­i­est way for me is to peruse Twit­ter, which is chock full of eye catch­ing head­lines from my favorite mobile news sources: Huff­in­g­ton Post, Buz­zfeed and the occa­sion­al CBS. Through online means, I am able to fol­low close­ly the issues that have been cap­ti­vat­ing me, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Fer­gu­son, MO sit­u­a­tion and police/pedestrian inter­ac­tions that have been crop­ping up.

I have always found it eas­i­er to work with var­i­ous social media and mul­ti­me­dia forums in gen­er­al, which is why I plan on going into dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing as a career path. And, as a jour­nal­ism major who has already dredged through news writ­ing I think that online jour­nal­ism will real­ly help me hone my online writ­ing skills, as well as how to gear infor­ma­tion (news or oth­er) to a cer­tain audi­ence or demographic.

Of course it is many boys’ dream to write for ESPN and cov­er sports — which would be a hap­py mir­a­cle — but I would like to find a com­pa­ny geared towards my inter­ests and help them gear their ideas toward a younger gen­er­a­tion. I think this class will help a lot, because it takes that more mod­ern, hip look at how infor­ma­tion is pre­sent­ed to the masses.