October 6, 2025: Blog Reflection 1.
For my upcoming story idea, I want to start focusing on some multimedia aspects I can add to my story. I would like to go to Mission Beach and take pictures of the beach/the coast to show readers what the beach looks like now, and then find other photos of the beach in the past and compare them to show readers how rising sea levels have affected the area. Another multimedia element I would like to include in my story are audio clips or a short social media video of people who live in Mission Beach or visit often. I may ask questions such as "How have you seen the beach change in the past five years?" or "Have you witnessed a King Tide event?"
Additionally, I want to interview several experts on climate change, or more specifically, on rising sea levels. People I plan to reach out to this week include Samantha Bova: an SDSU assistant professor in the College of Sciences. Her areas of expertise include climate change, paleoceanography, and past warm periods. Another person I am going to reach out to is Rebecca Lewison: her area of expertise includes climate readiness, land use, sustainability, and landscape connectivity. I am also going to do some vox pops at Mission Beach when I go to take pictures.
November 3, 2025: Blog Reflection 2:
Regarding lab activities, I would like to talk about our recent ChatGPT exercise. I thought it was interesting as a journalist to learn how to use ChatGPT to our advantage. It is helpful to know that there are ways to use ChatGPT for data journalism, such as creating our own gpt, as we did in class.
However, I feel that there are many drawbacks to using artifical intelligence like ChatGPT in the workforce. First of all, relying on A.I. to analyze data in journalism will lead to less critical thinking. Especially when it came to creating our own gpt in class, I felt like it would have been a lot faster to analyze the data myself. Humans make mistakes, but so does A.I, so using A.I to get things done quicker is concerning to me. Additionally, every time someone uses artificial intelligence, it uses a lot of water. According to greenmatters.com, writing one 100 word email with A.I uses one bottle of water. If I am remembering correctly, the chatgpt exercise in class took about 4 litres of water to do. So, using A.I. to complete this assignment was moot.