By Jake Garner
“If someone walks away from today and says, ‘I know for sure I do not want to do this,’ then we’ve succeeded. If someone walks away saying, ‘ Wow, this is exactly what I thought it was going to be like,’ and they’re excited about it, then we’ve succeeded too,” said David Tirrell-Wysocki, director of the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications in Manchester.
Oyster River hosted its 3rd annual student journalism workshop on Tuesday, September 29th. Students taking journalism I and II at ORHS attended the the workshop as well a journalism class from Dover High School.
The workshop ran all day from 8:00am to 2:30pm. Students were able to do hands on activities that mimicked what it would be like to be a real reporter, photographer, and layout editor on a news team.
Guest speaker and politician, Dan Tuohy, spoke about his experience in politics and the primary election process, which is coming up in November of this year. Students took notes, pictures and asked questions for the mock-article they would soon have to write on him.
Once Tuohy gave his speech, students broke up into two teams, where one team wrote the article and the other team put the article, and pictures into Adobe Indesign, a program for layout design, where they created a front page news letter of the guest speaker.
“I learned a lot by doing all of the hands on work and just by listening to Tuohy speak,” said Sarah White, a senior from Dover High School, who is interested in journalism.
Newly retired, Rod Doherty, who has worked for The Foster’s Daily Democrat for 33 years and has been working in journalism for over 40 years has been to two out of the three workshops here at ORHS. He says that: ”young people may not have a focus on what they want to do yet, and that’s fine, but this hands-on work helps them focus on whether it’s a career they want to pursue or not. That’s the purpose of workshops like this one.”
Dover’s journalism teacher, Andrew Chase, was excited when asked to join the workshop by ORHS’s journalism teacher, Shawn Kelly.
“I wanted to bring my students here to introduce them to the basic skills and the world of journalism. This workshop was a great success and my class and I absolutely plan on returning next year,” said Chase.