Preparations and expectations

In roughly 13 hours or so I will be boarding a plane to Seoul, South Korea to undertake a 4-week internship with the country’s largest media broadcaster. How have I prepared?

Heading up to the South

Today I did something which still feels pretty surreal to me: I printed out my airline ticket to South Korea.

My time at ABC Radio Australia

On the 6th of June 2011, I commenced a two-week internship at Radio Australia, ABC’s international radio broadcast and online service. During my time there I worked on a show called Connect Asia, which focusses on news and issues around the Asia region.

My desk

It was a great experience, and I was lucky enough to put together some stories that were broadcast on air. I even got the chance to talk live on air during the show!

Here are the stories that were broadcast during my time at Radio Australia – I think some of them were even broadcast on Asia Pacific (a news show that is broadcast nationwide).

Socially unfit for journalism

A few months ago, I sent a job application to a jewelry retail store. Despite being the only person turning up to the group interview in jeans, I managed to move onto the next stage of the application process: the in-store trial. As I’m writing this I’m currently jobless, so needless to say the trial didn’t go so well, and I was unsuccessful in my application.

Apple grabbing a bite of the apple

They claimed it would happen, but gamers were apprehensive.

Slowly but surely however, it appears that Apple are beginning to corner the handheld gaming market.

The broken game of classification

If you are a video game enthusiast in Australia, you will probably already be aware of the fact that our country is one of the few that do not have an R18+/adult rating for video games.

Tell me something I don't know, eh

It’s a pretty poor effort for the country’s part, but that’s not the end of the issues with Kotaku and The Age both highlighting a loophole in Australia’s classification system that the government now wants to close.

Latham at Large: a quiet look at it

As a journalism student I feel almost obliged to at the very least talk about Mark Latham’s stint at being a “journalist” for the Nine Network – namely his story about the 2010 Election for Sixty Minutes.

…before you write him off as a bully and an attention seeker, remember, Mr Latham has experienced an election campaign from the frontline.

Now I’m not too keen on the Australian political scene (or any political scene for that matter) but what immediately rings alarms in my head is that there is extreme potential for conflict of interest getting in the way of journalism here.

Out with the old, in with the new?

A couple of days ago this article was forwarded to me and everyone else in my course at university. With all of us studying journalism and aspiring to be fully-fledged journos in a couple of years, the story was relevent to my interests.

However, some things haven’t changed from the old days: the trainees will still be required to achieve a shorthand speed of 120 words a minute before being offered a full-time job.

Push the button

Being a child of the 90s, I came into the world at a fairly good time. Petrol prices were low and water restrictions were non-existant but most importantly, the video game world was rapidly changing. With game-changing (pardon the pun) consoles such as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sony PlayStation coming out in the same decade, you were a pretty happy chap in terms on what was offer in the 1990s as far as video gaming went.

The selective soapbox

Today marks a dismal day for Metro, the company behind running Melbourne’s train system, with a power outage at Southern Cross Station delaying 15 of the 16 train lines running in Victoria.

Not surprisingly commuters are not happy at all, with The Age publishing an article online containing a few choice comments sent in to them.