Articles Can Be A Drag

My experience of our first news portal article was, as I expected a little exciting, unfortunately, it soon became a bit of an annoyance. When writing an article, I really dislike the notion of being forced into writing something in which I don’t enjoy writing about. Writing something I’m not keen about creates a pseudo distance between me and the topic. Now don’t get me wrong, while I am a journalist at heart, it’s the idea of electronic media (gaming especially) where my passion lies. My other blog demonstrates this fact, and while I was not completely unmotivated by the topic, which pertained to writing about an interesting event or place in Durban by the way. The sources, in which I would gather material for our group’s article, were unwilling to give us a chance.

For our article, we had chosen a curio shop for foreign tourists. This shop had the reputation of being the largest curio shop in the southern hemisphere. Naturally, when our article relates to the tourists of Durban in the upcoming 2010 FIFA World Cup, this shop would have been perfect for our article. Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite the way we planned. I understand why they did not want to let us take pictures, for security reasons as far as I can gather, but their refusal to do the interview had no outstanding reasons to be declined. So in the end, what was achieved? Well, not only did they lose out on potentially very strong advertising, but we need a new topic and the deadline is approaching fast.