The Columbia trip was an informative trip that also offered some enjoyable experiences to bring home.
My first session was named “infobesity”. In this session the teacher, Jake, explained how our generation is in an ever-evolving time of change involving technology. Those companies or newspapers in our case that can’t keep up will be doomed to be unproductive and slowly fade off the main spectrum, like Blackberry and MySpace. He spoke about how the focus of new projects of this age should be technologically based. For example, newspapers should allocate more time to the Internet side of the newspaper as opposed to a printed copy.
Another great session I participated in was called “Ccornflakes, Confessions and Controversy,” this session was about controversial topics and censorship in a newspaper and what we should do as writers and moderators about it. The necessity for this conversation is because of censorship, specifically by principals and sometimes self-censorship by timid reporters. I learned in this session there are many outlets to get help so you don’t have to sacrifice your writing to please the administration.
My last session we discussed how journalism was about relationships. We talked about how journalism is about establishing connections with your readers, peers, and superiors. Establishing these connections make the difference between a good and bad journalist, and makes strong bonds so that people really want to work with you. The last session also helped with something that I needed a lot of help with and that is interviewing. Relationships also play a vital role in interviewing because, you can’t possibly expect the person you are interviewing to open up to you if they can’t trust you, and creating relationship can help establish that trust.
Overall Columbia shared great information and good tools that we could bring back to make the Friar’s Lantern as great as possible.
–Jacob McGraw
The Friar's Lantern Trips 