Teacher workshops begin, alum earns R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Big doings the next three weeks. The graduate teacher workshops begin on Monday. High school and middle school journalism teachers from around the state and region will be converging on campus in two waves, one this week and another next, for short courses on skills to keep high school media alive and well. For more information, on these publication workshops for teachers, check out www.mipa.jrn.msu.edu.

J-School faculty member Cheryl Pell and the wonderful members of the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association work in tandem to deliver these highly regarded short courses—and you can earn graduate credits!!

By next summer, we hope to begin offering an M.A. in journalism education. The proposal is in the university governance pipeline after its approval by J-School and Com Arts faculty this spring. We will also be offering two online courses in the upcoming academic year and an offsite class in Traverse City.

After two weeks with the grown-ups, it’s high school students turn to “Jump Into Journalism” at the week-long workshop on campus. Ms. Pell, our diminutive dynamo is the ringmasters for these three high octane weeks. There’s still room for a few more to join the fun. Again, for more info, check out www.mipa.jrn.msu.edu.

In more MIPA news, it successfully paired three high school journalism teachers with newspapers in a joint program with the Michigan Press Association. Check on Brian Wilson’s take on his experience at the Flint Journal below.

And for more good J-School news, here is one alum who is really earning some R-E-S-P-E-C-T:, Kelley Carter, formerly at the Detroit Free Press and now on staff at the Chicago Tribune is an Emmy nominee for her online Aretha Franklin package published in the Freep last year. For more info see: http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080715/ENT05/80715074

How Brian Wilson spent part of his summer vacation

By Brian Wilson of MIPA

When I first started with The Flint Journal, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. For sure, I wanted writing experience. I just didn't realize the extent of the writing and reporting I'd be doing.

Over the course of the last four weeks I've written maybe 25 stories. They have included everything from obituaries to in-depth pieces on topics like euthanasia in animal shelters and Michigan's Right to Farm Act. My work has appeared buried in the back of the news section, and it's run on the front page. In fact, in what is perhaps my internship's crowning achievement, one issue in which I actually had TWO front page stories.

It's funny; in different ways, the experience has been both exactly what I expected and nothing I anticipated. Going into the internship, my hope was that I'd be able to gain some "street cred" with my students. You know...I could say "Well, when I was working for the Flint Journal, this is what I did..." And I really think that I will be able to do that. I can share what I've learned about interviewing, and writing on deadline, and how page layout works on a daily basis.

But at the same time, it's been very different from what I expected. I really didn't think I'd be as busy as I was. And I didn't know that I would actually come to be seen as valuable in the newsroom. The three editors with whom I've worked all have told me how much they appreciate the work I've done. Maybe they're just being nice, but I really do feel like I've been an important part of the Flint Journal this summer. I am now trying to figure out how I might be able to keep working as a journalist and also teach at the same time. It's just what I need, really. More stuff to do.

But I love it. I mean, I really, really love this job. When I look at a newspaper display box on a street corner anywhere in Genesee County and see my name on the front page, I get goose bumps. When I get a phone call from someone who had read my story and wants to offer another angle, they probably don't realize that I'm smiling on the other end of the phone. When I get kicked out of the county animal shelter because I'm a reporter doing a story, I feel like Woodward. Or Bernstein. Or maybe just Geraldo, but it's still cool.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of my four weeks here is that I've figured out that I really could do this for a living. I'm pretty good at it, I think, and I'm almost modest enough to not want to share that fact (but not quite). Till now, I've never had any actual newsroom experience, and there was always a nagging doubt that I didn't really possess the very skills I was teaching my students. In the weeks leading up to the internship, in fact, that was my biggest worry. I knew I could talk the talk, but could I write the write?

I've also drawn some conclusions that my students might not like. For instance, I learned that writing a story in a matter of a couple of hours really is possible. I mean, there were days when I would start and finish as many as three full stories. When I think about how most of my journalism students work on the same story for perhaps two weeks, I wonder what we can do to accelerate that process. Granted, I was living and breathing my reporting all day every day, and they have many other responsibilities throughout their days, so it isn't exactly the same. Still, I really want to think about ways to push my students on their stories more than I have, without adding too much stress to their already-busy lives.

I've also realized in my time here that every story is different. I don't mean just the finished product; I mean the methods by which that story is developed. Sometimes I would do every interview over the phone and write the story without ever leaving my desk (that was also cool; my own desk). Other times I'd have to research deeply into topics with which I was unfamiliar. I'd go through archives of past stories on similar topics. I'd talk to other reporters about what they had written in the past. I'd use that old (OK, not that old) standby, Google, to surf a particular subject. Many times, I'd drive to a particular story location without much to go on, and my travels almost always worked out. This happened, for example, when I was writing about a guy who was reciting the Declaration of Independence on the steps of the Lapeer County Courthouse on the Fourth of July. I had driven to Lapeer and was sitting in my car, just about to head back to the office, when I spotted two girls sitting on the courthouse steps. I felt like I already had enough information to do the story, but something told me to turn off the car and talk to the girls. It really just struck my interest, the juxtaposition of these two modern-day teenage girls in jeans and flip-flops texting their friends as they sat on the steps of the oldest working courthouse in the state. It turned out, in fact, that they were history majors who had just come back from a trip to Greece. They gave me a series of great quotes about history and I painted them into the story's lead. I always knew that there was a very strong visual element in the act of reading. But maybe I didn't fully understand until this job that visuals are as important to the writer as they are to the reader.

And through it all, I came to the conclusion that I love to learn. That's one way in which my teaching job and my journalism experience are very much the same. In both jobs, I absolutely love the fact that by the time I leave the parking lot at night, I know something that I didn't know when the day began.