Journalism Primer 5

[Mike Gange]

If you are a journalism teacher, count yourself as lucky. Student journalists are typically not your rambunctious students. They are going to write, and if you can harness their energy, their drive, and challenge them to follow the formats or formulas, then they will become very good writers. And very well behaved students.

A study I read a long time ago said students who know their work is going to be read by others, as in published, will write a better story than those who think only the teacher is going to read their work. So your job is to get them published.

Another study from some time ago said that student journalists do better on SAT's and University entrance applications. This makes sense, along with the one above. Some one else is going to read their work.

Yet another study said that student journalism or journalism about students is either "Courts or sports." That means either the students are the criminals or the heroes. You know that generalization is not true. You need to help show the students that they can find stories about their community that are worth telling.

You can help break that trend by having them write about issues and trends. How kids dance today. How they dress at the dances today. What the lyrics are saying. Why teachers won't chaperone dances. These are all ideas related to the local community. You will hear journalism people talking about hyper local as opposed to local. Hyper local applies to your school community. Local news would be the mayor and council. Regional, National and International are obvious. Take any big name reporter, and I bet you dollars to a donut that person started writing local or hyper local news. You may have a big name journalist in your classes now. Only, they have not made a name for themselves yet. They will, with your help.

Why. 

We often talk about the 5-w's. (This is the name of a well known CTV current affairs program: W-5.) The most important one is why. Why are we seeing that boys don't want to read? Why are we seeing that more girls than boys are going to university? These are genralizations, of course, but they apply pretty well in my school as well as yours.

"Yonder sits the fourth estate. Theirs is more important than us all," goes the old quote. Apparently someone was observing the separation of church, state, and general population. Three estates. Then there were the reporters. The fourth estate. A CBC TV current affairs show is called the Fifth Estate. I guess they felt that the TV journalism they were doing was even a higher calling.

Those kids are in your class. They want to learn to be better writers. Count yourself lucky.