Evaluation Essay on My Journalism Practical Project on Veganism

My journalism practical project was a 20-minute radio feature on Veganism and the problems they face. The reason for choosing Veganism as my subject was because I am a vegetarian and soon want to convert myself into a vegan though they both sound the same but are very different from each other. The main difference between being a vegan or a vegetarian is that the vegans do not eat or use any animal products at all like milk, cheese, leather, fur from animals. Whereas the vegetarian people do not eat animals but may eat or use the products that come from them like milk, cheese or eggs. Another reason for choosing this subject was that I will get to research, study more about this subject and will get to learn from the things that I will go through in the process of making this feature. The 20-minute show was inclusive of 3 interviews and an overview of what veganism is and why is it growing more day by day. The one thing that I noticed while looking for people who could answer my interview questions was that women are more likely to become vegan as compared to men as it was very different to find a male someone who is a vegan.

I named my show ‘We the Vegans’ so that it attracts anyone who is planning to or wants to become a vegan but does not have the motivation to do so can listen to the show and receive some kind of motivation and gain knowledge about how easy or difficult it is to become a vegan. During the course of creating the radio show, I understood that it is not a drastic change if the change is from being a vegetarian to a vegan but from a meat-eater to a vegan is for sure a very difficult transition. It was very necessary to tell the people who do not believe in becoming vegan that it surely does have benefits that soo many people are trying to make a change. A meat-eater will never understand the benefits of a vegan diet that keeps you healthy, is good for the environment, it has all the essential vitamins, carbohydrates, fats, proteins and minerals that our body needs. It is also said that being on a vegan diet reduces the risk of heart diseases, type-2 diabetes, and cancer.

The interviews were all from three different types of people from various fields. The framing of my questions was in such a way that they focused on how being a vegan is easy and all the positives of the diet. One of them was Pankhuri a final year student at the University of Northampton who has recently turned a vegan and also shifted to a new country, she was the only one who has turned a vegan from being a meat-eater. The most important part that she mentioned about being a vegan in the UK is that supermarkets like Iceland, Asda, Sainsbury have a different section of food for the vegans. She was the youngest vegan amongst the people who I met. The second person was Henry who is from Leicester and has been a vegan for the past two years, his transformation was from being a meat-eater then to a vegetarian and then to a vegan. The third person was Param who is an International level boxer from India. This was the most fascinating interview for me as it covered a sportsperson or an athlete being a vegan. Sports is all about diet and nutrition, this proves that a vegan diet contains all that an athlete needs for his/her performance even if competing with a person who is a meat-eater. The reason why I wanted to focus on sports was so that I get to research more being a boxer myself and also wanted the listeners to know that if a sports person can be a vegan then anybody can.

I started my research by understanding why more and more people want to become vegan day by day, what is it that it is making them make a transition to just a plant-based diet the thing I understood is staying fit, not gaining weight unnecessarily and the best part of staying away from deadly diseases. The idea of keeping interviews in my radio documentary and not discussions made it easier for me to get in-depth knowledge of the subject to deliver it to the audience. According to me, this radio feature has helped me a lot to get me closer to my motive of transforming into a vegan as before I could choose this I found it really difficult to fit into a vegan diet and all the restrictions it contains of not using any animal product.

While recording for my radio feature I was a bit nervous as I had never produced a radio show. It was a whole new thing for me but because the subject that I chose was of my interest and in trend, I was confident to talk about the same. The one major thing that I noticed after recording is that I can even choose radio jockey as a profession as my voice sounds good on the microphone. It was a bit challenging to find vegan people and especially someone related to sports was the most difficult to find. Recording your voice is a very easy task once you know all that you are talking about and all of it is really making sense. The last and the final step before submitting the project was the most difficult of all the steps that was editing. I knew a bit of video editing on premiere pro but voice editing on audition was new for me. I learnt it in a few days and was successful in cutting, increasing the sound and stitching the audio with transitions for my radio feature. Overall I think I did a good radio feature but there is still a scope of improvement for the next project.