Wanna.b.Journos aspiring Journalists or posers?

Wanna.b.Journos review

By Benjamin Fogel

Among the seemingly infinite sea of blogs circulating around the endless webs of information known as the internet, there are very few which go beyond narcissism and contain both good writing and compelling themes.

Among the first year journalism and media studies student’s blogs in terms of titles the most honest one belongs to Wanna.b.Journos (http://wannabjournos.blogspot.com/). The title matches the spirit of the blog. The bloggers Sarita, Jessica, Rose and Ayanda are honest, earnest, and down to earth and you get a sense of their hopes and journalistic ambitions through their post. Even when writing about seemingly far off political issues, the blog manages to fit these into the narrative of being an aspiring journalist.

A sense of everyday issues which face students manages to be brought across without dropping into narcissism , from the torments suffered by Jessica Kriedemann due to res food to Sarita Pillay’s tackling of the issues of racial integration on campus. Both Sarita and Jessica particularly stood out as blogger and they were able to maintain a blogging personality, you could get a sense of the idealism of Sarita and the optimism of Jessica. Ayanda also gets a notable mention for her article on the Abahlali baseMjodolo Movement .

The blogs background is both attractive and easy to read, it fits well into the image of journalism students, I particularly enjoyed the pictures of coffee, cell phones and other items which are part of everyday student journalism. I as a student can relate to the horrors of all-nighters, writers block and the distraction of University life evident in the template.

Now to the negatives, the blog like many other JMS1 blogs did not go beyond the call of duty of the blogging assignments it had only 22 posts. It could have done with more posts. The template had a couple of errors most obviously the “write some words about you and my blog” left in. Otherwise the blog was well written, well edited and had interesting content. I lost out for the lack of self-inspired (not by the lecturers) posts and a couple of lazy errors.

7.5/10