Role for Constitution: My MA Journalism Project

This is actually a week or so late, but the journalism project I created for my second MA degree is now live!

It was actually live two months ago in September when I completed and submitted it – however, this version was created via a University-owned WordPress site. And even though it was publicly visible, I didn’t want to share or promote it, as we had been told there was no guarantee of the site staying up after our grades were done (and that we should in fact expect it to be taken down after) – so if I was going to direct traffic to a piece of work I made, I’d rather it be on a site I knew was permanent and also one that I owned.

So once my grade was returned (which it was – a distinction, pending Board of Examiners confirmation!), I was given permission to copy it over to my own domain, where it has its permanent site. The site speaks for itself as an self-contained journalism piece, with most of the explanation in its About page, so I won’t go into too much detail here. But our assignment was to create a multimedia journalism website project, that would host five different stories/articles that made use of multimedia content (video, images, widgets plus text). This NY Times piece on an avalanche at Tunnel Creek was provided as an example of what we were meant to create (although, within the constraints of it being a student project produced over a few months time on a limited WordPress site, rather than a website custom built by professional web developers).

My project was on the impact of COVID on tabletop communities. This isn’t actually a new topic in the world of journalism – you can google ‘COVID DnD’ and get articles such as this BBC one about how tabletop games allowed people to remain social during lockdown. So I took the journalistic method of taking a story and developing a new approach and angle on top of it – we’ve had pieces about how lockdown changed roleplaying games for people, but we haven’t explored the return to in-person game post-lockdown. Many pieces have of course been written about the anxiety a lot of people have in having to return to in-person events vs. the amount of people very eager to start mixing in-person again, and my project was on the same subject but with a hyperlocal focus on the roleplaying community, which itself had its own split of people anxious to get around a physical table.

Journalists have covered how both the retail and the hospitality industry had been impacted by COVID – within the RPG community, exists board game cafés, which can be a mix of two but also existing within its own niche. How was the impact different or similar to them. Within the RPG community exists creators of tools and products which they need crowdsourcing, and this was another area impacted by COVID. Finally I interviewed the creator of the Beyond20 extension. The app was a tool which assisted in virtual play by allowing them to roll from the popular digital DnD toolkit site DnDBeyond into the popular virtual tabletop website Roll20 with no extra work – such tools would obviously experience a spike in usage as everyone was forced to move into virtual tabletop play regardless of preference.

The website linked is near-identical to the one I submitted (which at time of writing is still visible here, if you wanted to compare) – the main difference being the absence of some widgets that the University paid for but I wasn’t prepared to, and a better implementation of the glossary sidepanel I was not able to do with the locked down WordPress site the University provided. I may go back to the website after today’s date (6th November) and make improvements, possibly add some extra content from collaborates that only got back to me after the submission, but I do not intent to make massive changes.

I am very happy with how the site turned out – so feel free to give it a read, it’s not lengthy and if you have thoughts or opinions, I would love to get those comment boxes populated! 🙂