About me...My name is Jonathan Walls and I am a junior at Flowery Branch high school. My mentorship has been at WDUN, the Jacob's Media news talk radio station in Gainesville, Georgia. I have always loved music and sound production and audio engineering, as well as marketing, and journalism. WDUN is a unique place that has all of those aspects in one place. A radio station must have a producer to run the sound clips, play the transition music, and make sure the mics are working. They must also market themselves to the right audience and have relevant and high quality advertisements. A news talk station must first and foremost focus on the news and telling the stories. I have had the chance to get my hands wet in each of these areas in my time at WDUN.
My primary job was to run the Show Clips page for The Afternoon News Wrap, the afternoon radio show that I worked for. I would record the best segments from our show each day, edit them, upload them to the Soundcloud platform, write a short article describing the segment, and adding it to the AccessWDUN website. I learned about audio editing, how to craft a catchy title for an article, and how to write intriguing descriptions without spoiling the story. In January we added a new weekly segment to the show, the Local Business Spotlight, in which we chose a unique local business that is making waves in the community. I had the chance to research many interesting local business that I was unfamiliar with as well as give them easy and free publicity on our website and show. Throughout the year my primary mentor was Russell Brown. He is the host of The Afternoon News Wrap, and a reporter for WDUN. I also had the chance to work with the show's producer, Brian Pirkle, news corespondents, Alyson Shields, and Brian Stewart. My mentorship taught me the ins and outs of how a radio station functions and what goes into providing the public with news. I have a greater understanding of the media and the industry as a whole. I learned how to use new software and tools for recording and editing audio, and creating and editing websites. |