By Glenda Ortega

This week I have been remembering my experiences as a college student 12 years ago.  I am taking a Broadcasting News course in the University of Missouri because I want to learn editing video, and I have realized the environment now is almost the same.

People from different U.S. cities come to Missouri to study journalism. Some students want to be a sports reporter, and others want to be TV anchors. There’s no difference with my classmates in Ecuador a decade ago. The difference is the language, and that I am not 20 years old anymore.

The other day, I talked with one of the students in my class, and she said she wanted to be a TV anchor. Now, she realizes some anchors are not reporters; they just are anchors. It happens all over the world. She also told me she really wants to demonstrate that she can be a good reporter. Definitely it is a challenge, she said, especially when some people think all anchors are not good journalists. 

Back to the broadcasting course: Someone asked me, “Don’t you know video editing?”

“Actually, I don’t,” I said. “I learned editing many years ago. Now, the editing program and technology are different.”

The technology evolution is constantly moving. This is something I have seen during these years as a journalist.

 Billions of people know about Facebook, Twitter and other social media and while those are also very useful for journalists, those platforms are not the only innovation these days.

The greatest thing about the technology for journalists is that we have different and useful tools so our readers or audience can understand easily the content.

During a journalism conference in Washington I heard about ‘Document Cloud’. Some journalists recommended it to upload document files related to our stories. People can create an account and log in. It’s free, and I have used already.

Other websites are not free, for example Tikitoki.com, but can be very useful as well. Using this website, people can create stories with text and pictures.

The best way to know about those tools is to looking for them in different websites or by just talking with people. They always have something new to tell us.

Technology and media are holding hands very often. We have to know how to take advantage of that relationship.