Alert! There's a New Blogger at SRU

Howdy everyone.

My name is Ian Ponitz, or as some know me, Sunshine. To get you more familiar with me, I'll start off with some basics. First things first, I’m a senior here at the Rock and I’m hoping to finish up my degree in Integrated Marketing Communication next semester. Secondly, I love music and more importantly I love live music; I’m a veteran of Bonnaroo Arts & Music Festival, an attendee of this year's Boston Calling Festival and I’ve also seen somewhere around 75 concerts in my life outside of festivals. Some call me crazy for spending so much on tickets but I consider myself cultured in that regard. Also as it relates to music, I’m the current General Manager for Slippery Rock’s own student-run radio station, 88.1 FM WSRU “The Voice of the Rock.”

Aside from those fast facts though, I’m in New Media Journalism for the semester and I took it for a few reasons. One being that this new age of journalism is all about using unique channels to reach your audience the fastest, the main goal now is to report any news quicker than any other outlets. I believe taking this class will help me understand some of those channels, or at least become familiar with new ones. Another reason for taking this course is that my journalism skills need shaping up before going out into the real world. My future career will most definitely have something to do with public relations, and journalists are considered to be one of the gatekeepers for the profession; understanding how journalism works in today’s ever-connected world can only help me out as such.

When it comes to social media, I’m quite active, however the majority of my feeds are just reposts of other accounts. I tend to keep my unique posts on Twitter to a minimum as I don’t think my opinions are really cared about among my followers, however my meme game is top notch. You can find my Twitter feed right here, and my Facebook feed here; like I stated, I don’t post a whole lot however anything I do find worthy of making it onto my account is usually funny or interesting in some regard.

Lastly just let me touch on some of my favorite outlets. In regards to a legacy outlet, I’m quite fond of Rolling Stone. I like it for the reviews on new albums and one-off editions that cover some of my favorite artists in depth. I’m also a fan of the Vice spin-off outlet, Noisey, that gives a unique spin on modern age music journalism. Noisey often gives me early breaking news on tours, music release dates and overall news in the industry, something most outlets can’t give to me.

To wrap up the post, here’s a link to one of my favorite Grateful Dead renditions of Morning Dew. I hope to end each of my posts with one of these links.

Thanks, and tune in soon to hear more about this semester in New Media Journalism.

- Ian