Neirad Attends the Farfield County Journalism Symposium
NEIRAD enilno edition
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Pizza, soda, lessons to improve writing and showing off your newspaper to other schools. Could there possibly be a better field trip? Neirad and a few students from the intro to journalism class recently traveled to Norwalk Community College to attend the Fairfield County Journalism Symposium. The event gives students the opportunity to attend workshops as well as compare and contrast their school newspapers. This year, Neirad debuted its new and improved newspaper redesign, which definitely caught some crowd interest.
The day began with the presentations of each newspaper at an assigned table. With the trusty tattered blue Neirad flag gracing the DHS table, Blue Wave Pride was on full display. The table was piled high with Neirad’s latest issue. The DHS journalists couldn’t help but grin as reporters from other schools complimented the impressive new redesign.
The day continued with classes, and it came as quite a surprise to find a schedule handed to me—I thought I was getting out of school! Yet, I knew these classes were something to take notes on. As serious journalists we went to classes with our reporter’s notebook in hand. Students had the option of choosing three presentations to attend. Guided by a few suggestions and my own interests (not to mention where my friends were going) I chose sports writing, features, and headlines.
In sports writing, a group of students and I learned how to improve our sports coverage. Some tips I picked up from this presentation by Advocate Sports Editor Dave Ruden was to always try and update your writing because season records may change and it could end up contradicting your earlier information. I learned that sports writing can be challenging in high school journalism because a reporter is writing about fellow peers.
If game gets out of hand, or a player fumbles, a student reporter’s account of the event can negatively affect someone's reputation. And this person may be someone the reporter may know—and see in the hallway everyday. Our group was taught to avoid this by not including names, and in some cases not even writing about it at all. Let’s face it—the football guys are a lot tougher than I am.
The features lesson was a little less structured instead offering a question and answer session. We bombarded the teacher, Advocate News Editor Karen Tensa, with our many questions about feature writing and received some helpful answers. Some good questions that were asked included, "what is a good way to do an interview for a feature?" in which the presenter responded, “ to get an interview going, talk about what's going on at the moment, simple things like asking how the person is, and later on getting into more serious questions." Another question that was asked was "what makes feature writing so special?" The teacher answered this question by stating, "feature writing is different because instead of dealing with breaking news, feature writing takes a different more in-depth look at a subject.”
Finally, I walked into the last lesson of the day: headlines. Rather than
dealing with stories as a whole, the headline lesson taught us how to make a
an article look interesting. Studies show that a good headline can pull a reader
into a story by making it look more appealing.
Since a headline can make or break a story, the lesson's teacher, The Hour Features Editor Nanette Morges, showed good examples of headlines, along with bad examples. One example was from a newspaper that had a story about bees terrorizing a local town, in which the title was "Bzzzzzzzzzz!" That was example of a bad headline because it did not clearly explain the true intent of the story. Students in the lesson were encouraged to write a better headline, mine being "Queen Bee Expands Her Kingdom." Maybe not much better, but an improvement nonetheless.
The day was an overall success. Our DHS group of eager journalists waved happily goodbye to Westword, Inklings, and other high school newspaper staffs. In fact, we even exchanged a few emails with other student journalists promising to send each other advice and story ideas (reminiscent of summer camp). As we waited with our goodie bags filled with a plethora of New York Times and NCC nick-knacks in tote, I couldn’t help contemplating over the day’s journey. Besides the classes, perhaps my favorite time was sitting back with my fellow newsies, drinking some soda, and in between mouthfuls of pizza--already discussing what we can do to make Neirad even better.
