#nhsjc

Dan’s Session Notes

Leadership Session

Social Media Workshop

How to make writing interesting

Controversial sources

How to get people to work

Thinking of stories

Survival of the Fittest - Making deadlines and the overall staff more efficient

Editorials

Surveys

Before Seattle, I wasn’t very excited. I was intrigued by the idea of seeing a new city and people from all over the nation, but not by the conference itself. I honestly thought I knew all I needed to know about writing for a school newspaper. This trip, however, showed me that I was completely wrong.

On day 1, Tommy and I did a 3 hour session on leadership at the bright-and-early time of 9 am. I thought this would be just a standard powerpoint session that I would try not to fall asleep in, but it did not turn out that way. When we sat at our seats, the woman running the session shocked me. She told us to get up and talk to the person next to us for 1 minute. “Oh god,” I said in my head. “This conference is not going to be fun.” But although I had a painfully awkward conversation with a 30 year-old-man from Hawaii, it wasn’t that bad. It set me up to get outside of my comfort zone for the next 3 days.

Later that day, Tommy, Eric, Mike and I went to a long, four hour session on Social Media.The speaker was hilarious and had us do things like instagramming a photo and caption of a random person and create a Spotify playlist that described our school (ours was a weird mishmash of No Nay Never, Shipping up to Boston, and Chance the Rapper). I gained so many new ideas that I never would have thought of myself. Our social media definitely needs to get an upgrade, so I’m glad I could learn about it to use next year.

The next day, Friday, was a whirlwind of sessions. My hand hurt from all the notes I was taking. I was amazed at how great the speakers were and how many practical ideas they gave us. There was also a “Swap Shop” session where I got to talk to other publications and how they operate which was very helpful.

The next day, we had our Quiz bowl competition. Our squad did much better than expected, making it to the Final Four. Admittedly, I never actually answered a question correctly, but no one needs to know that.

Next was our presentation. I think doing more preparation beforehand would have been beneficial for me, but nonetheless it went well. The Space Needle was also another highlight of the day.

As a last minute addition to the National High School Journalism Convention in Seattle, I learned quite a bit from our Blackfriar Chronicle crew.

Walking 12,000 to 18,000 steps daily on Seattle’s clean streets and amid the busy halls of the Washington Convention Center beside these brilliant, young scholastic journalists and their dedicated adviser Kate Plows reminded me that to do something well, beyond creating a nationally recognized newspaper, it takes time, teamwork, family, and dedication.  

Since the English teacher in me tends to capture snapshots in words, I tried to articulate a slice of what I learned from these folks and the convention in the following list poem:

It’s the Little Things

Arrive Early

Greet people, focus on them

Capture eyes

Be playful

Surprise them

Act like you know what you’re doing, especially when you don’t

No upspeak, speak up

Without ramble

Communicate with authority

Fill the frame - get close

Be there, Play, Choose your attitude, Make their day*

Criticize Correctly

Watch your body language and tone of voice

Their body language speaks louder than words

Smile - you can even hear one over the phone

White space lets the eyes breathe

Take a breath, too

Establish coaches, not bosses

Never talk over your group

The speaker deserves attention

Stand by your work and your team’s work

Building excellence means building relationships

Work backwards, Avoid obstacles, Plan for setbacks

Go beyond the predictable

Never lie; be sincere.

Real Change takes real effort

Tell the whole story

Somebody cares

*FISH Philosophy - very appropriate considering our convention was in Seattle, steps away from the Fish Market of Pike’s Public Market!

Thank you Mike, Dan, Tommy, Brian, Ethan, Chase, Aidan, Eric, and Kate for warmly welcoming me into your journalistic family and for teaching me how those little things are actually quite big and go way beyond a printed paper. :)

KP’s Session Notes

Notes linked at the title of each session. Within those notes, some highlights are keys I’d like to try yesterday.

First off, there is no note taking that could do justice to Tim Harrower’s presentation. In the absence of any notes, his website is chock-full of useful journalism info.

Administrators + Assertive Student Journalism: Embrace It

Susan Enfield is the Superintendent of Highline Public Schools in Washington. Incredibly powerful perspective on her transition from a journalism educator to a school leader, and on seeing student journalism from both sides.

Blackfish, Murrow, Time Warner... Oh My!

Annette Deming presented a six-week unit on media literacy, which would be super-sweet if I had A) class every day; B) a class, period, linked to the publication. But maybe someday...

Doing one thing really well

Possibly my favorite session of the convention. Jack Kennedy made the case for continuing to do print journalism really well, despite claims of a failing industry and pressure to go online. Ever think about who is claiming the ‘industry’ is failing, and whether it’s in their best interest to claim this loudly?

Photojournalism Basics for Advisers

I really need to take a digital photography class that’s longer than one hour. Mr. Satterthwaite teaches at Palo Alto H.S.

Not another InDesign Session

I want the hours of my life spent without these shortcuts back. Students and advisers were literally crying during this sessions. Notes don’t do it justice, but I learned about ten drastic timesavers.

1+1=Our Staffs

The student EICs of Southwest Career + Technical Academy presented some tips on balancing workload and time commitment with a small staff (just 11). Awesome stuff; their site is knockout. (Then again, they have a daily full class meeting time....)

Investigative Reporting: Covering hot topics without getting burned

Presented by two reporters from the MVHS Oracle who tackled hazing, sexual assault, and the dismissal of a teacher. “Don’t tell your adviser,” they said, atop some other stories that made my heart pound.

Conversations with Risk

The beauty of being a designer at a conference like NHSJC is that even if you don’t necessarily learn any new fancy techniques in Photoshop, InDesign, or Illustrator, there’s an abundance of design inspiration for new content to integrate into your own publication.

In fact, I think these sorts of conferences are far more valuable as ways to see other work and develop your own publication’s actual content or to think more in-depth about how to employ important design elements than as a way to learn new techniques to operate those programs.

Don’t get me wrong, you can learn a lot about a given program at a specific session about that one program, but you can gather design inspiration and ideas at any session. Not to mention, the internet is full of easily found, great tutorials on how to better use such programs, but it’s harder to find good examples of high school journalistic design to try out in your own publication.

For example, I can think of 2 or 3 separate sessions that I went to, both pre-convention and during the convention, that were primarily about design principles and how to apply them. Sessions like these were incredibly valuable ways of making one think about how they employed these elements in their own work. Of course you could probably find a decent explanation of those principles on the internet after searching for a while, but having an engaging speaker who you can ask questions of and network is infinitely more valuable. To use an analogy, are you more likely to be a interested student by reading from a textbook, or by having an expert in the subject having a conversation with you about it?

Even though these sessions that were primarily focused on explaining how to use things like contrast, alignment, repetition, and patterns, they were full of examples from magazines, yearbooks, and other newspapers that we can start using in the future. For instance, a presenter may be talking about alignment between a story and an accompanying infographic. While they may be focused on the alignment, as a designer I was fixated on that infographic and wanted to try out that style for myself.

Regardless of what any session was specifically intended to teach, I was able to get ideas and inspiration out of each one.

One of the things that always fascinates me with conferences or other events like this is incredible diversity of people there. By diversity, I mean the many different backgrounds, geographical locations, school types, school sizes, interests, etc.

For example, at our presentation alone there were people from Idaho, Nebraska, and Washington state, and that only accounts for <10 of the ~20-30 people who were in the room.. Those probably aren’t places that regularly cross your mind, especially as northeasterners, but it was incredibly interesting to me to speak with people from all over and to compare their everyday lives with your own. Of course there are minor differences in things like mannerisms and lexicon, but there wasn’t any massive divider that set us apart from each other in the end.

Being able to interact with peers that come from a totally different background and perspective than your own is an incredibly valuable and fun experience. I’ve always found listening to other students’ opinions of Malvern and private school students in general, and to discuss their differences of different types of schools with them.

One of the most valuable parts of these conferences is the opportunity they present and expose students to new perspectives with each other. It is quite easy to think that since we as students live in vastly different areas and have such a variety of backgrounds, we’ll be vastly different from each other in nearly every way. The opposite is true, however. Although we may live thousands of miles apart, we share many similarities. We share many of the same worries, passions, and thoughts, and without the opportunity to encounter entirely new people that events like NHSJC present, I’m not so sure that I or others would be able to understand just how similar we really are.

If there is one thing that stuck out at this convention, to me at least, it was the influence of Trump’s election in the presentations. In four out of the ten presentations I attended, the election was referenced at least once, and out of those four, twice the election was the main topic of the presentation. 

In the second presentation I attended, with speaker Tim Harrower, from the very start recent politics were introduced. He used childhood fables to convey comical, yet serious messages to the audience about Trump’s recent election. I would have preferred if he had left politics out of it, but with all the “fake news,” chatter that's been going on, it seemed almost mandatory for him to do that. He did an excellent job of keeping it under control; he backed his statements with hard cold facts and handled critical questions from the audience carefully. At a time like this, when politicians have such easy access to the public, many things can be hacked, photoshopped, and falsely claimed that can discredit news publications. Harrower was very smart to bring awareness to a new reality.

Make your publication a brand. The most important advice I learned on this trip. In order to make our newspaper more than just a paper we must learn as a staff to brand ourselves in school and in the local community. We should be able to walk into the LC and see kids who aren't on the staff with BFC merchandise. In order to do so I think the first step is deciding on one name for the newspaper and the online site. This makes it 10x easier when it comes to branding. Secondly, we should have fun contests around the school and get involved in supporting other clubs. Also, giving away free t-shirts, pens and other labeled items is great for free advertising.

In addition, getting involved with local charities as a team is a great way to draw attention and create a strong reputation in the community. This will make it easier for us to approach local businesses with propositions for selling ad space because they will have a better understanding of who we are. But it’s not just ad spaces in your paper that you can sell. Sponsored t-shirts, flyers, signs and other ways are great for bringing in cash.