What I learned
By Mary Polleys
On the last day of the trip, fighting exhaustion was an uphill battle. However, the two seminars I attended that morning were more than entertaining enough to keep me awake.
Both seminars were given by Jeff Nardone, a successful adviser for The Tower, a weekly newspaper at Grosse Pointe South High School.
The first seminar, entitled “Motivation is not a dirty word,” included many ideas I thought would be helpful for The Sentinel.
How do you get people to meet deadline? Since we are kids after all, a reward system is a good way to motivate us to get stories in by deadline.
How do you improve readership of the paper? We could try holding monthly coffee houses. The key is to make it fun for both the staff and the readers. As high school students, we are way more apt to do something if there is an element of fun. Maybe it shouldn’t be that way, but it is, and adjusting to that has made a weekly publication possible for them. Aside from his good ideas, Jeff Nardone was the best speaker I listened to because he wasn’t afraid to talk about or tell jokes about uncomfortable things.
For example, during the second seminar, entitle “The best dang sports pages ever,” he talked about a feature story exploring the difference between men and women athletes.
At one point, he started talking about how the number of knee injuries in women increase when they are menstruating. I think the second we heard the word menstruate we all woke up a little and paid attention to why he was mentioning such a thing. Because he is a high school teacher, Nardone’s jokes related to us more than the other speakers.
In his second seminar, I learned a lot about adjusting sports pages for a monthly publication. He thinks, like I do, that sports shorts should be a run down of up-to-date statistics because most of the time by the time the stories come out, the facts included are old. Sports feature stories are a good way to have information important to high school students and it doesn’t go stale as fast, like the story about knee injuries.
Overall, I found that I got the most from the last two seminars , but at least learned one useful thing from each seminar I went to. Even the one Neal dragged me into, “Covering the local government,” I learned that the newspaper reaching out to parents as tax payers is important.
I also learned that to break into writing about the government, you may want to start with what Mays called “softball” stories to get to know the leaders in government and they can get to know you.
By Mary Polleys
On the last day of the trip, fighting exhaustion was an uphill battle. However, the two seminars I attended that morning were more than entertaining enough to keep me awake.
Both seminars were given by Jeff Nardone, a successful adviser for The Tower, a weekly newspaper at Grosse Pointe South High School.
The first seminar, entitled “Motivation is not a dirty word,” included many ideas I thought would be helpful for The Sentinel.
How do you get people to meet deadline? Since we are kids after all, a reward system is a good way to motivate us to get stories in by deadline.
How do you improve readership of the paper? We could try holding monthly coffee houses. The key is to make it fun for both the staff and the readers. As high school students, we are way more apt to do something if there is an element of fun. Maybe it shouldn’t be that way, but it is, and adjusting to that has made a weekly publication possible for them. Aside from his good ideas, Jeff Nardone was the best speaker I listened to because he wasn’t afraid to talk about or tell jokes about uncomfortable things.
For example, during the second seminar, entitle “The best dang sports pages ever,” he talked about a feature story exploring the difference between men and women athletes.
At one point, he started talking about how the number of knee injuries in women increase when they are menstruating. I think the second we heard the word menstruate we all woke up a little and paid attention to why he was mentioning such a thing. Because he is a high school teacher, Nardone’s jokes related to us more than the other speakers.
In his second seminar, I learned a lot about adjusting sports pages for a monthly publication. He thinks, like I do, that sports shorts should be a run down of up-to-date statistics because most of the time by the time the stories come out, the facts included are old. Sports feature stories are a good way to have information important to high school students and it doesn’t go stale as fast, like the story about knee injuries.
Overall, I found that I got the most from the last two seminars , but at least learned one useful thing from each seminar I went to. Even the one Neal dragged me into, “Covering the local government,” I learned that the newspaper reaching out to parents as tax payers is important.
I also learned that to break into writing about the government, you may want to start with what Mays called “softball” stories to get to know the leaders in government and they can get to know you.
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