GSPA Conference

I really enjoyed the time I spent at the GSPA conference. I think it’s an awesome opportunity for young high school students to come to UGA and learn about journalism techniques from professional journalists and teachers. My high school didn’t have a newspaper – I think we may have had a literary magazine, but if we did, I’m pretty sure no one ever read it. Yearbook staff was the extent of my journalistic experience in high school, and I came to college not knowing the first thing about how to write a news article. I remember the first contributing article I wrote for the Red & Black my freshman year – it was crafted more like a short English essay than an article, and my editor had to go to great lengths to get it to be publishable. Some of these high school students are members of award-winning publications, and they are getting off to such a good start for college. Even if they don’t pursue journalism as a major in college, the writing, design, photography and communication skills they learn in their publications and in the conference will help them with whatever major they choose. It was really inspiring to see how knowledgeable and interested these students were in the sessions!

Anyways, here are my thoughts on the two sessions I attended. My first session was called “Newspaper Design,” and I attended it because I’ve never been involved with the newspaper design process. The session was interesting – we looked at the front pages of several different newspapers and discussed what we liked and didn’t like about them. I was surprised at how sloppy some of them were, considering they were professional publications. One crammed about seven different stories onto the front page, all of which were around the same size. Another had only two stories and entirely too much white space. I learned some interesting tips at the session, such as not using all capital letters for a headline because they’re harder to read. I had never thought about that before, but after I compared a headline written in all caps to a headline written normally, I realized it was true. We also looked at some funny design mistakes, such as a picture of Sarah Palin next to a headline that read, “Woman Robs Store, Picks up Kids from School.” It was an interesting and entertaining session.

The second session I went to was called, “How to Keep your Reader Hooked,” and it was mostly focused on ledes, which is one aspect of news writing which I could use a lot of help on! The presenter printed out a packet for everyone with a lot of tips and some examples of some pretty bad ledes from a high school magazine. We looked at these ledes and discussed what was wrong with them, then came up with our own way of changing one of them. Once again, I was really impressed with the students in this seminar. One girl told the class about how she often picks up on visual details during an interview, such as where the interview is held, what the subject is wearing, and how the subject behaves, and incorporates that into her lede. I learned to do that in my journalism 3410 class, and before then had never before even thought to incorporate these things in my lede. This girl is way ahead of me!

All in all, it was a worthwhile two hours. As I said before, this is such a great opportunity for high school students. I wish I had been able to go when I was in high school!