High school journalism students
Yesterday I went to speak at a high school journalism class at Sedro-Woolley High School. First off I really hate public speaking but I also like spreading what I know and helping when I can. So when the journalism teacher there, Bridget Heffele, asked me to come in, I felt I had to. I don’t know many people in every district so I figure it’s good to get in some face time when I can.
I introduced myself and gave a bit of my background, and then I asked how many of them read a daily newspaper, either online or in print.
Nothing. Not a one. One girl asked if MSNBC.com counted. I revised my question and asked if any of them read news sources. Only about five in a class of 15, and four of them read MSNBC.com (for story ideas for their paper) to the BBC (one student seemed to want a world perspective).
For the most part I was impressed with how enthusiastic some of the students were. A couple of them made their first open records request earlier this school year when creating a map of local sex offenders. I talked more about open records and explained what all you can get from such requests. When I said even their teacher’s salary was a public record, they all laughed. I’m not sure Ms. Heffele was as amused.
They’ve also been learning about the First Amendment and why a free press is important. Their questions were really interesting, from how to get your first job to how to freelance, to how to find story ideas, how to interview people, and the list goes on and on. One student complained that Ms. Heffele wouldn’t accept Wikipedia as a source. I’m sure he didn’t get the answer he was expecting when I explained why it was a really bad idea.
I passed out a list of good Web sites to them, which included links to Mindy McAdams’ site, Nieman Narrative Digest, Jon Marshall’s News Gems and many more. I emphasized how important learning to write well is to telling stories. Even with journalism moving to multimedia, you still need to have a base upon which to build your stories. I talked about what you need to learn, and I said learning Spanish would be really helpful, and attending college is a must. Math is also incredibly important.
Lastly I made sure they knew that journalism is not a high paying job. Far from it. We get paid less than schoolteachers. You have to love writing and telling stories, because the paycheck is not enough.
Here’s to hoping they learned something.