Our plan is to have a student forum, where students get to speak out about issues that are considered taboo or controversial on campus. Students will be given the platform to address sensitive or non-politically correct topics like DP’s and favouritism in serving portions at the dining halls to black students. The point of this is to give students a voice concerning issues that are usually ignored; we want to expose unspoken injustices on campus.
We can therefore be seen as sort of an “expose blog”. This theme correlates with our blog name, which is “uve been pind”, because what we are doing is using students’ experiences on campus to pin down the truth. This will bring about a greater consciousness among students of deeper issues that affect people on campus and hopefully solutions can be drawn out because of their exposure.
Our blog’s tagline is “write what we like, and we’ll read what you’ve got”, this is basically a challenge to students to make their posts interesting. We don’t want general campus news, gossip or hear-say; we want to hear about heartfelt issues that cut deep; things that wouldn’t dare be spoken about openly on campus or things that students have found themselves having to tolerate on campus that they feel they have no power to change. We want to liberate students from their oppression and voice their suppression in order to give them back the power: if not to get a change in the situation then at least to have the freedom to speak their hearts with no fear of condemnation.
Posts will be uploaded anonymously, thus ensuring the safety and liberation of our bloggers. This blog gives students the rare opportunity to share experiences, commune and speak boldly with no sense of inferiority or trepidation of what “others might think”, it’s purely about what the individual student has to say at that moment. This blog will definitely be a success because it is on a very personal level, and most of the issues raised will be issues that affect students daily; thus making impossible to ignore.
Audience of our blog:
Our target audience are students, because our blog is about discussing matters concerning students and how they deal with those issues. The audience (students) should discuss their daily lives in and around the campus. Journalism is about digging deep and revealing the unknown, in our blog we are putting that in practice as students have the chance to speak-out anything they want to say. This blog is made for the students and so, they should feel free to make their comments on the matters.
As journalists to-be, we should be able to create what can be said to be news-worthy and not by putting forward the things that matters the most to students. Journalisms students like scandal, exposure and drama and they would like to read a these kinds of blogs because that’s what their career lies and what’s more important they would like. The blog will also train students on news feeding; as they will be informing each other about what is happening around them.
The blog does not target “specific others”, students from outside our campus can also participate on our blog. The students are the blog’s best friends as the blog will always be there to listen what bothers the students.
Blogging references:
The basic theme for our blog is essentially a student’s forum where students can speak out and voice their opinions on issues that are not ‘politically correct’ or not easy to speak about in the open. So when we were searching through other blogs on the internet we stumbled upon Joe. My. God, this blog intrigued us and, made us interested because of the interesting means of display. The writer, Joe, has very open views and seems to accept every comment that has been made on his blog. This is something that our group used to devise our plan on how we wanted our blog to be, we want students to feel free and at ease to say whatever is on their mind and not to hold back for any reason, we want our blog to be a medium for students to truly say exactly how they feel without any sugar coating.
Another example of a blog that our groups became inspired by was a blog that concerned a murder of a Yale student. The blog is called The Huffington post by, we found that this blog interested us because it involved our age group, and we thought that we could incorporate these types of issues into our blogs. Safety on campus is an important issue on campus recently; laptops are going missing like hot cakes on sale. And we thought that if we could have students voicing their experiences and thoughts on the crime rate in an around Rhodes we might have more insight and therefore be more prepared, and those who have had crimes committed against them, can speak to and interact with those who have gone through a similar ordeal.
We also felt when browsing through political blogs, that yes they might not be the most exciting topic to blog about, but we thought lets face it, we are all students that are studying Journalism and the media, so we thought that if we could incorporate some political issues for students to discuss, then it would only be on benefit to ourselves, a good example of a political blog that we used was Health Care Bill by David Espo.
The character and “look and feel” of our blog is that since our blog is supposed to be a semi-formal, relaxed and open blog, basically an informal blog, our layout, design and navigation around the blog is very modern, simple and funky. The language style of our blog will be colloquial and informal, as we are focusing on the messages that come across, and less on language use. The style and presentation of our blog is that we want our blog to come across and a hip, funky and modern blog that the average student wants to follow and keep up with. We picked a colourful theme that we feel would attract our audience and also give a feel of our aims as well. The presentation should show the blog as modern, simple, fun and free.
According to what was previously stated, are aim is to bring freedom of speech to the students and to have the most fun and hilarious blog ever where everyone can take part and the good thing is that there are no limitations in our blog. We listen what our audience are saying because we created the blog for the people not just for ourselves.
