In Jay Rosen’s article, “When starting from zero…”, he speaks of how the best way to break into journalism without prior experience is to pick a topic relevantly popular in society and know everything there is to know about that topic. Rosen’s article also tells the reader the steps to take in order to become a savant in whatever niche of news you decide to write about, while also discussing the advantages and struggles of following this new trend. This is why Rosen’s article fully encompasses how anyone in the audience can become part of the journalistic field in today’s society if they truly feel strongly about something and want to put the effort and time into it.

Rosen’s article spoke to me because at this moment I am currently involved in a collaborative project with other people, where we plan to create a niche piece on theater and its many many aspects. So far our group has already covered Rosen’s first basic step of being social and getting the audience’s help because we as a group do not know everything there is to know about the extremely subjective and interpretive world of theater. We went out, obtained interviews, traded email correspondences, and talked to be people who showed were a part of or showed interest into what we were writing about, to make sure that when we create our piece we are as close to the actual truth about theater, and everything about it, as possible.

Now my group and I find ourselves going through the next of Rosen’s basics, as we are trying to take the information we have and make it both comprehensively knowledgeable while also effortlessly simple for the audience to navigate. This step has proving to be harder than expected, but not because of the topic itself. Working on a collaborative piece you have to constantly make sure you and the rest of the people working with you on the piece not only agree on the way each other’s parts of the piece are set up and delivered to the audience, but that when the parts are put together that they flow seamlessly across the board as to not confuse your audience and so that the collaborative piece is just that collaborative and not just a group of different people throwing in their opinion or style without any consideration or connection to the others.

However there is still one major step in creating a niche piece and that is to actually generate it. For my group this means that everyone’s work has completed, read, edited, checked for mistakes or errors, critically criticized, and reread to the point where each person in the group sees each part as something that will add originality and knowledge to the piece while also connect to the other pieces and helping to forge the synergistic energy of the piece. Because like Rosen said early on in his article the best way to start a successful journalistic work is having “narrow comprehensiveness” in whatever societal niche you, or in my case you and 5 other people decide they have something important to say or to write about.