Live from camp: Writing about something I had not heard about before camp

At ThreeSixty Journalism’s Intro to Journalism camp, all of the participants have had to choose a topic to write about. I chose to write a story about something I had not heard about before joining camp: a hip hop church that has up to 500 attendees.

A small church in North Minneapolis that reaches out to people by hip-hop? Interesting, right.

Well, at this point, I have completed a large chunk of my story, and I have learned many things about journalism and hip-hop churches – the most important pieces of journalism (proper research, good interviews and well written stories), the four elements of hip-hop, how it has changed and become commercialized since its beginnings, why the church uses hip-hop, and much, much more.

Throughout this camp, I’ve done interesting things such as, watching a video of a really bad interview; seeing Theresa and Dymanh, our peer mentors, act out different styles of interviews (hilarious!); going to the hip-hop church service over the weekend (new and interesting); randomly interviewing people on campus; taking pictures of random things on campus; and much, much more.

This camp has also showed me how much more important journalism is in the world than I had previously thought. I had not realized how important journalism is for communication, and for general knowledge.

So far, camp has been interesting and fun, and I have learned a lot.

Amolak Singh, Introduction to Journalism Camp ’11