Sounds of the Classroom

Today, we learned to gather and edit audio. That agenda may sound dry, but under the direction of radio journalist Deborah Bolling, it was quite the opposite.

Bolling wore her winged sunglasses both outdoors as she led us around the quad in observant silence and indoors as she energetically lectured about story-telling. She casually sat at the desk at the front of the room or leaned against the lectern in her color-splashed tank-top dress and wood beads. No business suit for this woman.

To Bolling, journalism is about texture.

“You’re not just going for the environment, you’re going for the mood of the environment,” she said.

She emphasized accuracy and spoke vehemently against selective portrayal. “You go into journalism because you are a living, breathing, walking historian,” she said.

After a crash course in both audio editing with Audacity and audio ethics from Professor Hatch, we dove right in. Students spent the afternoon editing interviews conducted of other students.

Listen to graduate student T Braunstein tell her Bootcamp story:

Tamara Braunstein goes by "T," "like the letter T."

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