Finally, you have gotten your hands on a copy of the Here and Now. As you flip through these colorful pages of both fact-heavy news stories and light-hearted features, do you ever wonder how it all comes together? How exactly the Journalism class brought these stories to life?
Making a student newspaper is a much longer, much more tedious and complicated process than one would expect. To get to that long-awaited final copy, the class must endure months upon months of brainstorming, researching, writing, and designing before something even close to what the student body sees begins to emerge.
The first step in building our paper is understanding one’s own role and responsibility in the larger process. The Editor-in-Chief (Nora Gosselin ‘15), Copy Editor (Pamela Lawrence ‘15), and Managing Editor (Arianna Scott ‘16) all must meet different expectations and all have various talents. A diverse group of people and perspectives is the essential ingredient needed to create a balanced student paper.
Once everyone feels comfortable in their roles, the Journalism class begins to brainstorm all possible stories and then break these ideas up into a variety of categories, including: national, local, lifestyle and student interest. Brainstorming sessions, led by Nora, can be chaotic, with the entire staff spitting out anything that comes to mind, from the completely ridiculous to the absolutely genius. We let these ideas sit for a couple of days before narrowing the options into a tighter group of potential articles. Each student then picks the stories that interest them the most and apply to their specific talents and interests. For example, Kendall Kaiser, as our resident sports writer, mainly focuses on stories about either national or community athletics.
After all of this brainstorming, students finally begin to research and write, which, trust us, is not nearly as straightforward as it may sound. We slowly move from preliminary interviews to rough drafts filled with holes where further research is needed. Dr. Perez-Caro and Nora then divide the class into pairs for peer-editing sessions, in which each article is torn apart and searched for both grammatical and content errors.
Peer-editing sessions offer each writer different perspectives, which often lead to further development and expansion of the piece. Once more complete copies begin to emerge, it becomes the responsibility of each writer to find accompanying pictures for their work on either Creative Commons, a website that offers images free of copyright issues, or done manually with the help of Arianna Scott, who also serves as our photo editor.
Having completed our articles and found our pictures, we begin to move into the long process of design led by Nora and Caroline Caterini ‘15, our head designer. The entire team helps sketch a preliminary outline of how we want the newspaper to look on pieces of scrap paper. Nora, Caroline and Pamela then transfer these ideas into InDesign, a software program used to develop papers for print. The rest of the class busily works to finalize the pieces and edit the photos into the highest resolution possible.
When the content has been approved by our faculty guide, Dr. Perez-Caro, and then edited once more by Nora, all the writers read back through their work. The design team, with guidance from educational technologist Mr. Ahluwalia, finally plugs everything into our InDesign template, arranging headlines, cutlines and images. At this point, we are ready to send the document to our publishers to be printed and packaged for final distribution.
It’s an unbelievably long process filled with writing and rewriting. So what exactly is the point of all this hard work? Why spend months upon months of preparation to put out such a newspaper in the first place? You might even ask, what exactly is journalism itself?
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, journalism is “the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media.” At the Here and Now, we like to elaborate further on such a broad and rigid definition, as it can’t possibly capture the expansive, colorful and essential heart of reporting.
When producing a newspaper for such a small, intimate setting as Stone Ridge, we must really consider our audience– what they want to hear and how they want to hear it. We look at the impact, immediacy, prominence, novelty, conflict, and emotion involved in every single event that could possibly touch our community.More than anything, we want you–our readers– to know that moving forward, the Here and Now will never be filled with articles that a student could easily read much higher quality and better written versions of in the New York Times or other professional sources. Instead, we promise to deliver a local, relatable perspective on both global and community events– speaking to you, dear reader, personally, as a peer and a friend. We plan on making publications more frequent, more eloquent and more interactive. All we ask of our Stone Ridge community is your interest and continued support. Just remember that we’re only six students and a teacher trying to illustrate the indescribable value of good journalism. We hope you find something meaningful in these pages. Thank you.
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